Not very unusual and it actually keeps quite well as long as it's kept in a tub/jar with a reasonably well-fitting lid.Unusual to find in this form, very hygroscopic.
Yeah, quite expensive.Here is the supplier reference where ammonium thiosulphate powder is available.
Not really unless you can get fertilizer bulk quantities of ATS. Don't bother; many of us have explored this and about the best you can do is break-even with commercial fixers. What does help is to buy fixer in somewhat larger quantities, which tends to give you a better per-liter price.wanted to check before if it was economically viable to make my own fixer.
Absolutely; it can be used for pretty much everything. B&W and color film, paper, alt. processes like Van Dyke, salt print etc.Can C41 fixer be used to process black and white paper?
Thank you very much for all your replies.
Here is the supplier reference where ammonium thiosulphate powder is available.
I wanted to check before if it was economically viable to make my own fixer. I currently use Rollei RXN fixer, which I buy in 5-litre containers, covering my needs for about six months. Indeed, this does not seem to be the case.
Can C41 fixer be used to process black and white paper?
Not very unusual and it actually keeps quite well as long as it's kept in a tub/jar with a reasonably well-fitting lid.
It does tend to sulfur out a little bit with prolonged storage, so a fresh solution made with it will be slightly milky. This doesn't hurt, but if it's considered a problem, the solution can be filtered.
As the others have said, it's surprisingly difficult to obtain reasonable quantities of 60% ATS cheaply, given the fact that it's so widely used as a fertilizer. I think the main issue here is that most fertilizer products are compounded from a couple of materials, of which ATS is only one. Hence, it seems that the bulk 60% ATS solution is mostly sold to companies that compound these products for sale towards end users.
Absolutely; it can be used for pretty much everything. B&W and color film, paper, alt. processes like Van Dyke, salt print etc.
The MSDS for the fixer that I recommended in post #4 above is there:I have not found any safety data sheets mentioning the chemicals used in C41 fixers: are they neutral or acid fixers ?
I know what you mean @mshchem and it's the same around here. "Green fields" of monoculture. Where I live, the fields have two shades of green in summer: monoculture grassland and monoculture corn. Both are for beef & dairy. We import soy at a massive scale from Brazil where we chop down rainforest to grow the soy. This soy is then converted by our cows into manure. We have so much manure that only certain types of grass and corn can grow.
Fertilization is more subtle here; they used to use spray tanks as well, but that was banned a few decades ago. I think it was just too visible; we like to shove things under the carpet a bit more so we can pretend that all is well. Nowadays it's injected by arrays of shit injectors into the top soil. This happens to the extent that the soil can no longer bear it and the liquid manure overflows the soil and puddles on the field, or it simply flows in the many brooks/canals that were dug to drain the soil because otherwise the tractors get stuck too often.
We have totally and utterly raped this land. Most people don't realize because it looks green enough, doesn't it, and the cows look happy, too. We passed the mark of unsustainable by around 1965. For the past 60 years we've been living on borrowed time, propping up the system artificially. Sooner or later, some bug will turn up that eats corn faster than the cows can and that will be sufficiently resistant to the gallons of poison we cart onto the fields (so nice, those corn seedlings popping up in April...but hey...how come it's only corn...?) Something's gotta give.
Maybe at that point ATS will become cheaply available to us photographers because there'll be no other application for it anymore. There will be a brief moment when we get to eat all the cows and can do photography, before hunger sets in.
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