Develop RA4 Color in B&W developer?

[Mark Crabtree]

Edit--I was able to answer my own question with a bit of refinement on my google search. It seems like this will yield only a week image. Along with the other hassles involved, probably not worth the bother. I hate to throw paper away, but this doesn't seem worth the bother.

Original question:

I make proof sheets of every roll of film I shoot, mostly for filing/finding purposes and a bit for picking what to print. To economize, and to make use of otherwise useless paper, I use any old paper I can make an image on for this purpose. I'm out of everything but the relatively good stuff now and was wondering if I could use up some old RA4 color paper by running it in black and white chemistry.

I realize that I can just try this myself, but figure someone here has an idea whether this is likely to yield a useable image at all. Color neg film certainly works that way, and the paper shouldn't have the color mask issue, but I really have no idea and had never thought of this until paper price shock hit me today. The paper I have is well beyond its useful life for color even if I had an interest in running RA again.

 

[pdeeh]

Not so much a weak image as a very low contrast image with no proper blacks.
I got a box of Endura 8x10 very cheap a while ago, to try out for paper negatives (the lower contrast over ordinary paper being an advantage when printing from paper negs), but overlooked the fact that most colour paper has backprinting which renders it useless for this purpose ... d'oh ...

 

[Mark Crabtree]

What sort of development did you give it, or did you not even bother once you noticed the backprinting? I might deal with the safelight issue, but not if I also need to mix up something different for developer. I always start out with my proof sheets, so could probably start with my developer warmer for those.

 

[pdeeh]

It's a few months ago & I didn;t make notes, but it will have been whatever I had to hand, probably a pretty generic paper developer from Fotospeed that I've got 5l of, at a standard dilution.

I used a paper drum rather than tray developing so that rather avoided the safelight issue except for loading and unloading holders and drum