IlfordDelta 3200 Professional

Ilford Delta 3200 Professional is a fast black-and-white negative film with an ISO speed of 1000, designed to be exposed at EI 3200 and given extended development in standard black-and-white chemistry [1]. Ilford markets it as “the world’s fastest black & white film”, built on its “Core-Shell” crystal technology [4]. A tabular-grain film like the rest of the Delta range, it came out in 1998 and replaced Ilford’s HPS film [11].

Look and color

Delta 3200 turns colors into grays according to its own spectral sensitivity, not the eye’s:

• Blue renders lighter, skin and reds darker. Converting our test RAW files with the Delta 3200 curve instead of plain luminance made a sky 4.4 L* lighter, skin 6.3 L* darker and a pink shirt 3.0 L* darker. That is darker skin than with the Tri-X 400 (−3.8) or HP5 Plus (−5.7) curves [17].
• Extended red. The curve stays high up to about 670 nm, where Tri-X and HP5 Plus have already fallen off [1] [13] [15].
• Filters. Ilford refers to the filter maker’s factors [1].
• Reviews: none of those we read describes how colors translate; they focus on grain, shadows and the low-light look.

Tonality

• Pushed by design. At EI 3200 the film receives about 1⅔ stops less exposure than its ISO speed calls for, and is given extended development [1]. Ilford recommends EI 1600 to 6400 and allows EI 400 to 25000 [1].
• Curve. In Ilfotec DD-X for 9 min (close to the 9½ min given for EI 3200), base plus fog sits high, near 0.3. The toe is short, the straight section rises at about 0.65 over about 1.2 log units, then a progressive shoulder compresses the highlights without blocking them (our reading of the graph) [1].
• Development drives contrast. Ilford’s contrast-time graph gives an average gradient of about 0.56 at 8 min (EI 1600), 0.63 at 9½ min (EI 3200) and 0.74 at 12½ min (EI 6400) in DD-X (our reading) [1].
• The reviews disagree on contrast.
  • Blue Moon Camera finds it “low contrast, especially compared to TMax P3200” [6]; Simon King calls it “quite even and grey, even in mixed lighting” [7]; The Darkroom, “medium contrast, very subtle tones” [8].
  • Casual Photophile sees “more hard blacks” than HP5 Plus, which it calls “a mosaic of grays” [5].
• Shadows are the point of agreement. At EI 3200, “shadows do have a tendency to underexpose and not hold much detail” [6]; “Delta 3200 definitely does lose that shadow detail” [7]. Underexposed, it turns “really muddy and flat”, so The Darkroom advises metering for the shadows [8]. Julian Tanase finds EI 1600 “much closer to the real sensitivity” [10], and Blue Moon Camera shoots it at 1600 [6].
• Highlights hold. Simon King says it “handles overexposure very nicely”, with “plenty of highlight detail” about four stops over [7]; Analogue Wonderland notes that bright stage lights are not “totally blown out straight away” [9]. That matches the shoulder of the datasheet curve. Our reading: the contrast people see comes mostly from blocked shadows, while midtones and highlights stay moderate.
• Long exposures: no correction from 1/10,000 to ½ s. Beyond that, Ilford’s graph follows adjusted time = metered time^1.33 [1].

Grain and sharpness

• Harman publishes no granularity or resolving power for Delta 3200 [1]. Ilford’s product page speaks of an “unobtrusive grain structure” [4]. Kodak’s figures are measured at normal development; RMS values from different developers are only roughly comparable.
• Reviews describe grain “in great abundance in highlights, shadows – pretty much everywhere” [5], and “heavy grain in almost all conditions” that stays “oddly smooth, definitely not blocky” [7].
• Format matters: The Darkroom finds the 35 mm grain “chunky” and the 120 grain “more subtle and pleasant looking” [8].

Spectral sensitivity

Ilford’s wedge spectrogram, made under 2856 K tungsten light, is almost flat from 400 to 670 nm, with a shallow dip near 510 nm, and falls steeply only past 670 nm, ending near 698 nm [1]. The 2002 and 2018 editions print the same curve [2] [3], and darktable’s built-in preset treats Delta 400 and Delta 3200 as sharing it [16]. Once the red-rich tungsten light is corrected, blue carries more weight than in any other Grain Archive black-and-white style, so skies render lighter and skin darker than in a luminance conversion [17].

Names, status and history

• 1998. Delta 3200 was introduced in 1998, ten years after Kodak’s T-Max P3200, and replaced Ilford’s HPS film [11] [5].
• Speed rating. The box says 3200, but every edition of the datasheet we read gives an ISO speed of 1000/31° and presents 3200 as an exposure index [1] [3].
• Formats. On September 29, 2026, Ilford’s product page listed the film in 35 mm and 120 [4]. The June 2025 datasheet adds 35 mm × 100 ft bulk rolls [1].
• Datasheet. The current datasheet is dated June 2025. Compared with the November 2018 edition, it adds the bulk rolls and drops the development times for other brands’ developers, such as Kodak D-76 and Rodinal [1] [2].