FomaRetropan 320 Soft

Foma Retropan 320 Soft is an ISO 320 panchromatic black-and-white negative film made by Foma Bohemia in the Czech Republic, sold as a “retro” film with a wide range of half tones and soft light [1]. Reviews date its launch to 2015 [3] [4], and Foma supplies its own Retro Special Developer with it [1]. It is a separate film from Fomapan 100, 200 and 400, with its own datasheet and spectrogram.

Look and color

Retropan 320 turns colors into grays according to its own spectral sensitivity, not the eye’s:

• Sky and skin. In our finished style, made from Foma’s spectrogram, a sky comes out 2.2 L* lighter than in the base render and skin 2.7 L* darker [12]. This rests on an assumption, because Foma’s chart has no scale (see below).
• A soft, low-contrast look. Foma describes “a wide range of half tones and soft light” [1]. View Camera Australia sees “a distinct low contrast look” with “a rather long mid grey scale” [6], 35mmc a low-contrast film whose subjects do not “pop” [4], and Parallax “a good range of tones” [5].
• Glow. EMULSIVE writes that “light sources glow, objects are haloed in the emulsion’s texture” and calls it “a smooth almost theatrical patina to reality” [3]. None of the other reviews we read mentions it, so treat it as one reviewer’s account.

Tonality

• Curves. Foma publishes characteristic curves for the Retro Special Developer at 3, 5 and 8 minutes, with no gamma value. Read by eye, the 5-minute curve has a high base density (about 0.35), a low slope (about 0.6) over most of its range, no clear toe and a soft shoulder [1]. Contrast grows with development time.
• Development. Foma’s times aim at “medium-contrast negatives” [1]. View Camera Australia developed 4×5 sheets in stock Retro Special for 4 minutes at box speed [6].
• Erratic in contrasty scenes. EMULSIVE says it “behaves erratically in high contrast situations, giving strange artifacts and gradations to areas of bright light” and finds “odd contrast” and “imperfect gray tones” [3]. No other review we read reports this.
• Latitude. Foma promises very good results from 1 stop over (ISO 160) to 2 stops under (ISO 1250) [1].
• Long exposures: no correction from 1/1000 to 1/2 s, then ×1.5 at 1 s, ×6 at 10 s and ×8 at 100 s [1].
• Paper. Foma suggests variable-contrast or warm-tone papers for enlarging [1].

Grain and sharpness

• Foma calls the film “fine grain” with “good resolution and contour sharpness” but gives no RMS value, grain index or lines-per-millimeter figure [1]. RMS values from different developers are only roughly comparable.
• The reviews disagree. Parallax finds “an especially distinctive grain” and “particularly high sharpness” [5]; 35mmc calls the grain “insistent and belligerent” in 35 mm [4]; EMULSIVE finds “large milky grain” [3]. View Camera Australia, on 4×5 sheets, found grain “quite nice and smooth” at 8×10 and “creamy smooth” at 16×20, and adds that it is “not an excessively sharp film” [6]. Format and developer differ from one review to the next.
• Halation. The datasheet lists a clearing anti-halation backing for 120 and sheet film, none for the 35 mm film [1]. Only EMULSIVE describes halos [3]; our style’s glow is an interpretation of that one account.

Spectral sensitivity

Foma publishes a wedge spectrogram made under 2850 K tungsten light, with no scale on the sensitivity axis. The curve rises from 400 nm with a small hump near 460 nm, dips near 480 nm, has bumps near 525 and 580 nm with a dip near 550 nm, then climbs to a broad maximum around 675 to 680 nm and cuts off sharply at about 694 nm [1]. Part of the rise toward red comes from the tungsten light itself. Once that is corrected, and assuming the curve spans about one log unit as on Ilford’s charts, skies render lighter and skin slightly darker than in a luminance conversion [12]. The shape is close to the Fomapan 200 Creative’s, but its red cut-off is about 20 nm shorter [8].

Names, status and history

• Maker. Foma Bohemia is based in Hradec Králové, in the Czech Republic [1].
• Introduction. EMULSIVE and 35mmc give 2015 [3] [4]; Wikipedia’s page on Foma Bohemia cites an announcement of a new Retropan 320 Soft dated May 19, 2015 [13]. We found no statement of the date from Foma.
• Status. On September 30, 2026, Foma’s catalogue listed Retropan 320 Soft as an active product [2].
• Formats: sources disagree. The 09/19 datasheet lists 120, 35 mm (135-36 and bulk lengths of 17 and 30.5 m) and sheet film in a box of 50 [1]. Parallax marks its 35 mm cassettes as discontinued [7], and 35mmc wrote in 2021 that the 35 mm version had been dropped while 120 and large format remained [4]. We found no notice from Foma, so 35 mm should be treated as reportedly discontinued.
• Also sold as. We found no rebrand or respool of this film.
• Datasheet. The current datasheet is marked FOMA 09/19 [1].