Some film announcements are really announcements about a product. Others tell you something about the people still using it.
Ilford's decision to put Pan F Plus ISO 50 into 4×5 and 8×10 sheet film is very much the second kind.
Pan F Plus has been quietly doing its thing for decades: extraordinarily fine grain, high resolution, strong edge contrast and the kind of clean, smooth tonality that makes it particularly good at revealing just how good a large-format lens actually is. It has long been available in 35mm and 120. Large-format photographers, meanwhile, have been asking Ilford to make it in sheets.
Apparently, they asked enough.
Giles Branthwaite, HARMAN Technology's Sales & Marketing Director, says sheet Pan F Plus was possibly the company's single most requested product. Photographers can finally load it into a 4×5 or 8×10 camera.
There is a catch, though. As of August 13, 2026, B&H Photo lists both the 4×5 and 8×10 versions as temporarily out of stock, with an estimated availability of 7–14 business days. That's perhaps not surprising for a film that apparently spent years on photographers' wish lists.
And it isn't exactly cheap.
B&H currently lists a 25-sheet box of 4×5 Pan F Plus at $87.99, which works out to about $3.52 every time you pull a dark slide. The 8×10 version is $274.99 for 25 sheets, or roughly $11 per exposure.
That puts the new 8×10 Pan F firmly in think before you pull the dark slide territory.
For comparison, B&H lists a 36-exposure roll of 35mm Pan F Plus at $17.49, or about 49 cents per frame. A roll of 120 is $12.99, roughly 68 cents per frame. The 100-foot 35mm bulk roll is $160.99, making the economics considerably friendlier if you're willing to load your own cassettes.
Of course, comparing a 35mm frame with an 8×10 sheet is a little ridiculous. That's like comparing a postage stamp with a bedsheet and complaining that the bedsheet costs more.
The point of Pan F Plus in 8×10 is not economy. It's information.
This is the slow stuff
Pan F Plus is ISO 50, and it behaves accordingly.
This isn't the film you reach for when the light is disappearing and you have a photograph to make before dinner. It rewards a tripod, careful metering and a photographer who doesn't mind taking a little time.
Ilford recommends EI 50 as the normal exposure index, although EI 25 can also produce good results. With an 8×10 camera, movements, bellows extension and filters, that ISO 50 rating can turn a seemingly straightforward exposure into a small piece of engineering.
But that's precisely where the film starts making sense.
Pan F Plus is designed around fine detail and minimal grain, rather than speed. Ilford describes its resolution, sharpness and edge contrast as defining characteristics, and recommends it for subjects where those qualities matter more than sensitivity.
Think landscapes. Architecture. Still life. Studio work. Carefully lit portraits. Anything where the camera is already on a tripod and nobody is expecting you to work quickly.
And then there's contact printing.
An 8×10 Pan F Plus negative is already enormous. Put that negative directly onto photographic paper—or use it for platinum/palladium—and you're working with a combination of negative size and extremely fine-grained emulsion that makes the traditional argument for large format particularly compelling.
You're not buying Pan F because you want more grain.
You're buying it because you want less evidence that the film is there at all.
The darkroom matters
Pan F Plus isn't particularly fussy about chemistry. It can be processed in standard Ilford developers as well as a wide range of other developers.
At EI 50, Ilford gives a development time of 8 minutes in Ilfotec DD-X 1+4, 6½ minutes in ID-11 stock, and 14 minutes in Perceptol stock, at 20°C/68°F.
Perceptol is the obvious rabbit hole for anyone chasing the finest possible grain, while DD-X offers a more general-purpose route.
There is, however, one bit of Ilford's technical guidance that deserves to be written on the darkroom wall: don't leave exposed Pan F Plus lying around indefinitely.
Ilford recommends processing exposed film as soon as practical and ideally within three months.
For a photographer shooting 8×10 at $11 a sheet, that's probably good advice anyway. You want the photograph developed—not forgotten in a drawer.
The real significance
Ilford already has a strong large-format lineup. HP5 Plus gives you speed and latitude. FP4 Plus offers a slower, versatile classic. Delta 100 brings modern tabular-grain technology. Ortho Plus gives photographers its distinctive orthochromatic response.
Pan F Plus occupies a different corner.
It's the specialist.
The film you choose when ISO 50 is fast enough, when the camera is on a tripod, when you're willing to wait for the light—and when you want the negative to contain an almost unreasonable amount of detail.
That's why this announcement feels bigger than another SKU appearing in Ilford's catalog.
Film manufacturers don't generally respond to niche demands by adding expensive new formats. HARMAN says photographers kept asking, and eventually the company listened.
For a medium that has spent the last couple of decades fighting for its survival, that's a rather encouraging story.