[pure-silver] Re: Fuji film developers


----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin F. Knotzke" <jknotzke@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 10:29 AM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: Fuji film developers


<quote who="Ben R. McRee">
XTOL in a 2 liter size-That's great news!

Didn't Kodak take the smaller sized XTOL off the market because of
premature failure?

  J


--
Justin F. Knotzke
jknotzke@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.shampoo.ca


There were two different failures. The original 1 liter packages had a tendency to let air leak in. Kodak tried increasing the proportion of Sulfite in the smaller package (which contains the Dimezone-S) but it didn't work. The 5 liter size never had this problem.
The other problem is the sudden failure syndrome. This is not confined to any size package. No one seems to know for certain what causes this. I've had it happen with a 5 liter size. About 3 weeks after mixing the developer it essentially stopped working. I did a clip test comparing it to D-76 of fogged film samples. The D-76 produced the expected very high density, the Xtol barely even produced a gray deposit. I got a replacement package from Kodak but have never felt like taking a chance with it.
Kodak recently changed the design of their packages for powdered chemicals. The old ones were made of paper coated with metalized plastic on the inside. These were supposed to be completely impervious to air and moisture, they weren't. The new packages are completely plastic and are seamed on one side only. These are supposed to be much more reliable than the paper packages. Ilford is using a similar sort of package.
I usually use D-76 1:1 for T-Max (and nearly everything else) but recently have been using Ilford Perceptol for 100T-Max. This produces grain nearly as fine as Technical Pan but without the fussiness in processing. Effective speed is about EI-50. Perceptol and Microdol-X produce rather nice tone rendition, especially on 35mm film where the grain can make the the tone quality rough.

---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 

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