Hunting for Expired Film on eBay
Fresh film was always expensive, and I already knew from experience that expired stock was the cheap way around that, often just a couple of dollars a roll if you bought in bulk. I’d also already fallen for one of these stocks specifically: years earlier, someone had given me a single roll of Kodak 320TXP, and I loved it enough that the name stuck with me. So when I went looking on eBay for good bulk deals on expired film, I wasn’t browsing blind. I knew what I wanted.
That search turned up two separate purchases. One was a bulk lot of Konica Minolta Centuria 400, mixed in with other, unrelated film rather than a lot of pure Centuria. I just picked the Centuria out of it. The other, a separate order entirely, got me somewhere around two hundred rolls of Kodak 320TXP, in both 120 and 220 roll formats mixed together in the same order. I can’t tell you the exact split between the two formats; that number never stuck with me and I’m not going to invent one. Of the Centuria, I ended up with roughly thirty rolls, and I say “roughly” because I never actually counted them. That’s just my own estimate, looking back.
By the time I shot this session, I was down toward the end of that 320TXP stock. Two stocks, two very different film types, black and white and color, both well past their expiration date, both loaded into the same camera in the same afternoon. That’s the setup. Here’s what I found out.
The Long-Lost Rolls of Kodak 320TXP
Kodak 320TXP is mostly known today, if it’s known at all, as a large format film. It’s still sold in 4×5, 5×7, and 8×10 sheets. What a lot of people don’t realize, and what I didn’t fully have straight myself until I dug into it, is that it also existed in 120/220 roll format, and that roll version was discontinued around 2010. Not 2013, which is the number I’d had in my head. The sheet film kept going. The roll film didn’t.
There’s also a correction worth making here because I’ve seen it repeated enough that it’s basically become accepted wisdom: 320TXP is not some kind of predecessor to T-Max P3200. They’re not related at all. Tri-X, including the 320 Professional version, uses Kodak’s older cubic-grain emulsion, the same basic silver-halide structure that’s been around for decades. T-Max, including the P3200, uses a completely different tabular-grain “T-grain” emulsion that Kodak developed later, specifically to get finer grain at higher speeds. The two lines existed side by side for years, aimed at photographers who wanted genuinely different looks out of their black and white film. One isn’t the ancestor of the other. They’re just two different families that happened to come from the same company.
As for my own rolls, I had roughly two hundred of them, and I honestly can’t tell you the exact split between 120 and 220 format. I remember it being mostly one with some of the other mixed in, but which way that split actually ran didn’t stick with me clearly enough to state as fact, so I’m not going to pretend I know.
Here’s the part that actually made me want to write this post: as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single other account online of someone shooting expired 320TXP and talking about it. Plenty of people have reviewed it fresh. Nobody seems to have shot old, expired rolls of this specific stock and put their results out there. If that’s true, this might be the only one.
Since nobody else seems to have put an actual process on record, here’s mine. I developed it in Kodak Xtol, usually diluted 1+3 or 1+2, sometimes going down to 1+1 depending on the scene. For shooting speed, I typically rated the film at EI 250, dropping down to EI 100-150 in brighter conditions, and then developed everything as though it were rated around ISO/ASA 200-250, regardless of what EI I’d actually shot it at. This isn’t a one-off guess I made for this session. It’s a pattern I settled into over time shooting this specific batch of expired 320TXP, and as far as I can find, it’s the closest thing to a documented process for shooting this stock expired that exists anywhere.
The Centuria Question Nobody Agrees On
The Konica Minolta Centuria 400 is a different kind of discontinued. It was a mainstream consumer color negative film, ISO 400, meant for natural color and reliable skin tones in everyday shooting conditions. It went away when Konica Minolta pulled out of the film and camera business entirely in the mid-2000s. Unlike the 320TXP, there’s actually a decent amount of online chatter about shooting this one expired. The problem is that chatter doesn’t agree with itself. One account says expired Centuria skews warm, with reds pushing too far forward. Another says it goes the opposite direction, cooler and washed out. A third claims it drifts toward purple. Three people, three different answers, no consensus.
I’m not going to pretend I can settle that argument. What I can tell you is what happened with my rolls: toward the last couple of them, I started noticing real color shifting, almost certainly from how they’d been stored over the years. I liked it. It gave the images a look I wasn’t expecting and wouldn’t have gotten out of fresh film. I didn’t track the shift precisely enough to tell you exactly which direction it leaned, warm, cool, or something else entirely, so I won’t manufacture a specific answer just to sound authoritative. What I’ve got is a fourth data point in a debate that already has three that don’t match each other. Take that for what it’s worth.
Why Running Two Mismatched Stocks Wasn’t a Juggling Act
Here’s the part I actually think matters most for anyone thinking about doing something similar: running two different expired films with two different aging profiles in the same session, in the same camera, sounds like it should be a headache. It wasn’t, and the reason comes down to the camera.
The Fuji GX680 meters through the lens with an aperture-priority TTL system, and that metering already accounts for bellows extension automatically. On a view camera, you’d normally have to calculate a separate exposure factor any time you extend the bellows for close focus, on top of whatever you’re already compensating for with expired film. On the GX680, that math is already handled behind the scenes. The only thing I actually had to think about was dialing in a lower effective ISO on each stock to account for age-related speed loss, and then trusting the meter to do the rest. No stacking a bellows calculation on top of an expired-film guess on top of a manual reading. Just one adjustment per stock, and the camera took care of everything else.
That’s the whole reason I could load black and white 320TXP for part of the session and color Centuria 400 for another part without it turning into a balancing act. The camera did the hard part.
Coming Back to the GX680
I don’t want to make this post about the GX680 itself, so I’ll keep this part short. This was one of the first true medium format cameras I ever used, and it was one of my favorites when I first got into photography. At some point I sold it to go try other medium format systems. Eventually I came back to it. That’s really all there is to say about the camera side of this story.
The session itself was with Alice, a model I’ve worked with numerous times and one of the most reliable, most professional people I’ve worked with. The film is what I actually wanted to talk about.
Where That Leaves Things
Two expired stocks, tracked down deliberately on eBay years apart, shot in the same afternoon on a camera that made the whole thing easier than it had any right to be. The Centuria adds one more voice to an argument about color shift that nobody online has actually resolved. The 320TXP, as far as I can find, doesn’t have another voice in the conversation at all yet. Now it does.
