Comparison of two photographic printing papers at low contrast

I've cherished a couple standout printing papers over the years. One such paper was Agfa Portriga Rapid. It had a thunderous black, a warm tone emulsion coated on a light cream-colored paper, and was very malleable in appearance using common darkroom chemicals.

However, Agfa Portriga Rapid mutated into an unsatisfactory paper in the late '80's (according to some accounts, the change was made due to tightening environmental restrictions). I searched for a new favorite and found Kodak PolyMax paper. It was a neutral tone paper without the warmth of Portriga Rapid, but produced a maximum black nearly as deep as Portriga Rapid, had a smooth range of gray tones, and didn't have migrating fluorescent brighteners to veil the blacks. It also had the advantage of being a variable contrast (VC) paper. I also noticed that Kodak PolyMax had a "look" when used with very low contrast printing filters that I found appealing compared to other papers.

During the summer of 2004, I ran a series of tests on Kodak PolyMax to compare it with Ilford's popular MultiGrade paper. I found a "VC hump*" on the Ilford paper at low contrast (using Ilford's #00 filter). The Kodak paper using Kodak's lowest contrast filter (-1) did not exhibit this hump. Its characteristic curve was very smooth even when producing very low contrast prints.

You can also see from the graph that the Kodak paper was capable of a little more black (2.35 vs. 2.3) than the Ilford. In reality, that's an insignificant difference.

I also found that starting around contrast grade #1 and higher (not shown), both papers were producing fairly smooth curves.

Thankfully, most photographers don't need to reach often for a #00 or  -1 filter to save contrasty negatives. Still, it happens from time to time, and the Kodak paper avoided the midrange hump that other multi-grade papers produced.

*I recall that Phil Davis wrote an article about the multi-grade hump in the Sept/Oct 1994 issue of Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques Magazine (Vol. 15, No. 5) It's now called Photo Techniques magazine. In the story, he had published examples of the appearance produced by the hump. It was obvious from the story that some papers were essentially useless at very low contrast. Ilford Multigrade was far from being the worst.