[Noble]

The manufacturers of film have already done good quality studies; it's their job! Second guessing them, and reinventing the wheel seems to be an awful waste of time that could otherwise be spent using the film one likes to make interesting photographs.

I am not aware of any manufacturer that has published such a study. Have I missed something? Also when reviewing published scientific articles one always considers the prestige of the periodical and the authors' credentials and possible conflicts of interest. I realize some people will read a statement put out by a corporation or see something on Fox News and take it as the gospel truth but that is not how science is done. If an article is published in Nature it will carry far more weight than a self published statement put out by a commercial entity comparing its products to competitors. Nobody draws objective conclusions from such materials. The idea of this study is to have an open source project that is unbiased and gives details regarding every step of the process so the results can be replicated and expanded upon... or refuted.

The tests you speak of, if Delta 100 was included, would only be relevant/interesting to me if "my" developers were included. That markedly increases the complexity of the test.

Which is why I suggested that you only test the film/developer combination that the manufacturer recommends and perhaps one popular alternative. If you try and test everything you will end up testing nothing. That is one kind of analysis paralysis I mentioned earlier. And if you just choose to test everything in D76 a lot of your results will be useless for real world applications. You will not be all things to all people with such a study. Even the Framingham study didn't cover everything.

I am not suggesting such a study should alter the way every photographer works. Those that want to use the results are free to and those that wish to ignore them, can. I just think Michael R 1974 is right. There is a paucity of objective independent data in this field. Which is curious because most of it's underpinnings are just physics and chemistry.