I’ve played with pretty much any film I come across, and in terms of cost-benefit I’ve settled on Fomapan films. I like the grain structure, they are some of the cheapest BW film available and have great latitude if you like to mess with stand development. I shot this photo on a Pentax ME camera using Fomapan 100. Developed at home with Ilfotec DDX and scanned with a Canon 5D Mk3 + Canon 100mm f2.8.
Kentmere is great for price, agreed on the low contrast but I was ok with that, easy to fix in post and sometimes I liked the “neutral” look of the shots, however I was getting very dirty scratched negatives from it. Clearly that is my fault, but I thought I was being careful with them and it doesn’t happen to me with other films so I’ve switched to Fomapan.