There seem to be a lot of threads tangled up in this. It seems worthwhile to sort them out. Kodak is struggling on several fronts. (IMO) Ilford took over the B&W "art" market long ago, [with Kodak's finance folks blessing]. Less real competition and decreasing market size is one of the things that have driven B&W prices up so high. [It used to be MUCH cheaper than color, if you can believe that!] Unfortunately, from a lot of the reviews I've read lately, Fuji seems to have taken over the color market. I'm sure they spend a lot of time at Kodak trying to figure out where to go next. I've never seen lab printing of B&W that was worth the effort. Here I'm talking about "off-the-shelf" labs, not the $100 a print gallery houses. (IMO) B&W printing is best done by the artist, either using conventional optical enlargement or digital processing of the scanned negatives. That being said, it should be fairly rare that the labs would screw up developing the negatives. It just should not happen with the chromatogenic stuff, as it is run along with their normal color negatives. [It would not be a surprise at all if the prints ended up ugly.] It could be that conventional silver grain B&W is just such a speciality job now that all the quality control has turned to turds? That would be a sad state. Also, it would be really rare to get a bad batch of film, with the exposure sensitivity varying so much. I'd expect equipment malfunction, had you not been getting good results with other suppliers. Grain and sharpness have been debated and measured endlessly. There are too many variables to allow blanket statements. A major factor in the dance between grain and sharpness is the film developing process; something one has very little control over when sending to a lab. It is very possible the labs you are using are more optimized for Ilford. Very generally (remember what I said about blanket statements), conventional silver negatives are granier than chromatogenic negatives. The silver grains can make the result look "sharper" than with the chromatogenic dye clouds, even though actual laboratory measurements may indicate the chromatogenics have better lines/mm. Some folks describe chromatogenics as "mushy." I also remember T-grains being called mushy when they first came out. Also, very generally, the chromatogenics have a wider exposure tollerance than conventional silver. This is good and bad, as the results can sometime look "flat." [Where with silver, there may be no results at all...] I really hope to see a lot of posting in this thread. The question of, "What is the best film?" fortunately never seems to go away. Unfortunately, most consumers out there really just don't give a damn. It'd be interesting to mail this thread to Kodak and see what happens.