Calbe A 03

I was hoping to get my hands on some Diafine for its ease of development and fine grain. Turns out that it may be rather hard to come by in this part of the world, so I started looking around for similar products - and found Calbe A 03 listed as a fine-grain developer for all types of B&W films, with a single development time for all films. Does anyone have any experience with this developer? Does it work well with Ilford and Foma films? Thanks.

The A03 from Calbe is an old tank formula like Agfa/Gevaert Refinex .It is most used in graet laboratory's for developing all brands of film to one printeble standard.
Not so fine grain.
Better to use is A49 from Calbe (like Atomal)
I have here in Belgium diafine in stock
Guy Meurs

Hello Matej

Have you tried www.calbe-fotchemie.com?

It is rather easy to make you own two bath developer.

Hi Matej,

in case you come to Berlin you can pick up A03 5 Liter packs for 50 cents.
But they are from ORWO and over 20 years old (yet still working).
Other alternatives would be: MACO LP supergrain liquid conc. or E102 universal developer (which is by far the cheapest).
These developers all feature high equalizing capacity and 5-7 minutes for all films. They are extremely easy to use and produce good results especially for beginners. The others are right: A49 or other developers make finer grain and in the end better negatives yet they are much more difficult to use and if I think back to my first years of developing basically all films of the first 3 years are useless because I screwed something up with the dilution or agitation or temperature....
If I had used any of these equalizing developers my first results had been much better.

You can fin all prices in our catalogue for your information.
http://www.fotoimpex.de/Katalog/katalog.html

We can ship to Slovakia.

Regards from Berlin,

Mirko
www.fotoimpex.de

Thanks everyone for your responses. I currently get quite satisfactory results with ID-11 and Microphen, so mixing, temperature and development times are not a problem. What attracted me to Diafine was increased film speed with very acceptable grain, and I thought maybe Calbe A 03 would be similar. If it's not, then I'll just stick to what I use now. Thanks again for the info.