Foma Bohemia added FOMASPEED PAN to its black-and-white range on 18 September. The company calls it a special photographic paper designed primarily for use in pinhole cameras and photobooths, and says its high sensitivity "opens up further possibilities for classic black-and-white photography, combining traditional photographic techniques with modern processing methods."
Nothing else has been published. No ISO figure, no spectral sensitivity curve, no sheet sizes, no surfaces, no contrast grades, no price, no shipping date. The paper is absent from Foma's own catalog pages, and macodirect and Fotoimpex, which usually carry a new Foma product within days, do not list it.
Both named uses put paper where film normally sits. A pinhole camera has no lens and no aperture ring; the hole itself sets the aperture, commonly somewhere between f/150 and f/300 depending on how the camera was built. Ordinary enlarging paper runs at an effective speed in the low single digits — slow enough that a darkroom can work under an amber safelight for minutes at a stretch — and against an aperture that small, that speed produces exposures counted in minutes rather than seconds. A photobooth has the opposite constraint and the same cause: it exposes paper directly and must return a strip while the sitter is still sitting.
The name carries the claim Foma has not spelled out. The company's panchromatic films are FOMAPAN and its orthochromatic ones FOMA Ortho. Paper sensitized across the visible spectrum records reds and greens near their real tonal relations instead of rendering a red barn or a sunburned face close to black, which is what blue-sensitive enlarging papers do. It also cannot be handled under a safelight of any color. The darkroom goes dark, and so does the inside of the booth.
GP