There is a theory that one of Kodak's motivations in creating the Tmax films was to reduce their silver costs which had spiked. Other manufactures followed suit with T-grain products. Steve Anchell says this was an abomination and that consumers were being cheated out of their silver and the Tmax films were inferior to cubic grain films.
T-grain film technology was a gigantic step forward and gave us many things we take for granted today like fine-grained ISO 800 color film, etc. It made 110 cameras give acceptable image quality etc etc etc etc ETC.
To throw this progress and effort down the toilet, is obscene. I don't know who Steve Anchell is but his argument is ridiculous. This was major technical progress that increased the sharpness and the sensitivity of film. Tmax 100 and Tmax 400, as well as the Acros and Delta films, are wonderful films able to give amazing results. As are Provia 100F, Velvia, Superia... who also use this technology in the Fuji-guise. As are Portra and Ektar.
Ektar 100 has the fine grain that Ektar 25 had some decades ago. Thanks to T-grain advances (and other progress).
I don't care if a film has "more" or "less" silver, to argue about that is completely silly, sadly some marketers used the "more silver" argument to push their technologically inferior film. "More silver" is good if you need very high Dmax if you're making B/W slides and intend to project them, other than that...
Photo Engineer (RIP) said many times that if your manufacturing process is not so good, you'll need more silver than necessary. This isn't a good thing.
