Testing a 1940s 16mm Bell and Howell Filmo 70 DA with 1969 expired Ilford FP movie film

This was a quick and dirty test of a double-perf only Bell and Howell 70DA 16mm camera. I had some old 1969 dated Ilford FP (Full Pan) film bought from eBay a while ago, took it on a walk around Liphook in Hampshire to see if the camera was any good. Unexciting, but there it is.

As this Filmo 70DA only takes double-perf film, it severely limits the stock you can get for it - there's not much of it being produced now, leaving expired film as the main option.

Before loading the film, I used Singer sewing machine oil into the oil ports inside and on the front of the camera. It seems to run smoothly, and the results on the film are very steady. It runs for around 30 seconds on a wind.

Exposure is fully manual - I set a meter app to ISO 32 to account a bit for the age of the film, and the B&H manual suggests that the shutter speed at 24fps is 1/42 second. Compare to the Bolex which is 1/60… so the B&H could be quite useful in low light. Sometimes I even remembered to set the lens aperture.

On the camera was a single lens, a 25mm Som Bertiot Lytar. It's pretty sharp. The camera is very heavy, and walking while shooting was a mistake.

I'm surprised how well this 53 year old Ilford film came out - it was developed in D96 made up last year, with a water stop bath and F5 fixer made up to the Kodak recipe. It's also the first time using a Filmomat tank for 100ft of 16mm film. All very experimental, so mistakes were made handling the film.

I have a couple more rolls of this old Ilford film in the fridge, and am confident that it can be used for more thoughtful projects in future. It would be really nice if Ilford could make FP4 as a new 16mm cine film. :)