Are We Really Stuck With Ilford MGFB? Where Are the Magic Papers of the Past?

You got it, and the vast majority of them will produce indistinguishable results on most contemporary papers. Relatively extreme changes are required to make practical differences. The tone reproduction, D-max etc. are largely baked into the paper.

bernard_L said:

Any paper developer from any supplier has:

• Outstanding shelf life
• sparkling whites
• superb separation of mid-tones
• extremely deep blacks

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True.

Milpool said:

You got it, and the vast majority of them will produce indistinguishable results on most contemporary papers. Relatively extreme changes are required to make practical differences. The tone reproduction, D-max etc. are largely baked into the paper.

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I've used Dektol from the Dawn Of Time and recently tried Ansco 130. The differences, while subtle, are definitely there. But the most important thing about 130 is storage and use time. My frequency of mixing stock developer has plummeted.

chuckroast said:

I've used Dektol from the Dawn Of Time and recently tried Ansco 130. The differences, while subtle, are definitely there. But the most important thing about 130 is storage and use time. My frequency of mixing stock developer has plummeted.

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I've been using John Wimberley's 130B for about 8 months and like it, but I'd like to slide away from Glycin since its availability is sometimes unknown.

John Wiegerink said:

I've been using John Wimberley's 130B for about 8 months and like it, but I'd like to slide away from Glycin since its availability is sometimes unknown.

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When available again, I plan to buy ahead 6-12 months worth of normal use and freeze it. That can damp out some of the availability ebb- and flow.

miha said:

Hardly. You get 10 L of working solution from 1 L of Multigrade (1+9), but 5 L of Bromophen 1+3 makes 20 L of working sol. They cost about the same.

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Bromophen's capacity per litre of working solution is 43% less than Multigrade though.

John Wiegerink said:

I've been using John Wimberley's 130B for about 8 months and like it, but I'd like to slide away from Glycin since its availability is sometimes unknown.

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Glycin is not a complicated synthesis. It has one rather nasty component involved (chloroacetic acid), but nothing particularly out of the ordinary for industrial organic synthesis.

What you need to ask yourself is why the major manufacturers very rapidly came to prefer PQ developers (especially given the very long road to achieving efficient Phenidone manufacturing), and ploughed a lot of effort into making modified forms of it.

If Phenidone was still as difficult to make as it had been before the breakthroughs achieved by Ilford's researchers in the 1940s, it would be more fetishized than glycin is today. Levinson and others at Kodak had clearly cracked what glycin was doing back in the 1940s, but it is also equally obvious that as each of the major manufacturers arrived at similar conclusions, they did so while trying to ensure that their competitors would still waste effort on a component that was readily substitutable.

Craig said:

Bromophen's capacity per litre of working solution is 43% less than Multigrade though.

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Bromophen processes 40 prints (FB) per litre of working solution and Multigrade 50, so Bromophen has 20% less capacity per litre, not 43%. But a Bromophen package makes 20 L of working solution while Multigrade makes 10 L, giving about 800 vs 500 prints total, or roughly 1.6× more capacity overall.

The facts on capacity from the Ilford data sheet.
Another point not to be neglected is the price of the developers.