Diafine recipe

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 22, 2021

relistan said:
That appears to be this person's name for the Dark Room Cookbook's version of Diafine with a metaborate substitution.

oh.. ok! I feared it could be one more Diafine substitute like the Bauman Diafine substitute that @gorbas posted. Well.. it's nice to have so many substitutes for Diafine. And then there's Emofin and Emofin substitute(s).

J N said:
My "Imfine" with 20g metaborate rather than Borax worked fine and gave me typical Diafine negatives.

If that's the case then the single use Metaborate substitute I mentioned earlier should also work fine.

Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
I've used 80ml/liter of this as a single use substitute for Metaborate in Part B of Thornton's Two Bath developer and got good results. As it is a single use second bath, there's no worry of carryover accumulation. It can be prepared from easily available chemicals and is also very economical. It should be interesting to try it with the Diafine substitute, of course with a small test strip first.

ruilourosa · Jun 22, 2021

Bauman formula has nothing to do with the original Diafine, nor the results that are going to present.

Ronald Anderson apud Patrick Dignan in his 150 DIY BW popular formulas says:

A:
Water 750ml
SS 35g
Hidroquinone 6g
phenidone 0.2g
sodium bisulfite 6g
WTM 1L

B
Water 750ml
SS 65g
Kodalk 20g
WTM 1L

it also says that using 20g of borax instead of kodalk renders it closer to DD-76 but with panthermic characteristics

i already found that DD-76 is quite panthermic, although i tend to use 6 min in each bath with ilford agitation (1min continuous and 10sec for each min) and it´s contrast is good for grade 2 @ condenser enlarger (durst laborator 1000) i will probably try thorton´s divided developer formula to see if it matches grade 2 in my focomat v35.

This diafine substitute works as it should with a somewhat grainier effect than dd-76 but with more contrast and speed.

foc · Jun 22, 2021

I have never tried Diafine but I have been following this thread with interest.
I liked the way Diafine lasted until part A went below the volume needed for your dev tank.
I also liked the idea of most films having the same dev time.
I came across this and wonder what do you think of it?

https://www.retrocamera.be/en/darkr...film-developer-part-a-500ml-part-b-500ml.html

ruilourosa · Jun 22, 2021

I think that you should buy raw chemicals because 18,95 for a diafine type developer is a steal. i could make the same for 10 times less or even less if i used Sodium hidroxide+borax to make metaborate

but it should work as supposed

ruilourosa · Jun 22, 2021

but i think is a common price nowadays...

Mark Crabtree · Jun 22, 2021

Diafine is crazy expensive these days, but I'm another who tried the substitutes and got thin negatives. I tried different bases. If other people to manage results like Diafine, then I have to suspect the problem was my phenidone.

I don't use Diafine as a general purpose developer but have found nothing to match 2x Diafine for the most dismal lighting situation I encounter.

ruilourosa · Jun 22, 2021

2x?
you double the concentration?

cheers

relistan · Jun 22, 2021

foc said:
I have never tried Diafine but I have been following this thread with interest.
I liked the way Diafine lasted until part A went below the volume needed for your dev tank.
I also liked the idea of most films having the same dev time.
I came across this and wonder what do you think of it?

View attachment 278093

https://www.retrocamera.be/en/darkr...film-developer-part-a-500ml-part-b-500ml.html

I had seen this at Nik and Trick in the UK as well. The price seems quite good compared to Diafine. I thought about ordering some to compare with my developers.

Mark Crabtree · Jun 22, 2021

ruilourosa said:
2x?
you double the concentration?

cheers

No I run it through twice to get the maximum push. I did a lot of tests and this got me the most usable negatives in that very low light situation.

A/B
thorough rinse
A/B

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 22, 2021

I wonder if any of the Diafine substitutes has been put to substantial use on different films and compared with Diafine. Are the results from the substitutes consistent with those of Diafine? The very need to use a more alkaline second bath than the recommended Borax suggests that the substitute was never really compared with Diafine by the people who formulated the substitute.

relistan · Jun 22, 2021

Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
I wonder if any of the Diafine substitutes has been put to substantial use on different films and compared with Diafine. Are the results from the substitutes consistent with those of Diafine? The very need to use a more alkaline second bath than the recommended Borax suggests that the substitute was never really compared with Diafine by the people who formulated the substitute.

Yes that definitely was not compared. Diafine MSDS shows a mostly carbonate/sulfite bath B now and in the 1980s it was mostly trisodium phosphate/sulfite bath. No way the bath A for that high pH bath B is going to be much similar. Results might look similar but the other characteristics will be different.

Now that I’ve experimented with these two baths so much I think the thing Diafine got really right is the carryover thing. Making a two bath that works is not hard. Making one where you can reuse B as much as Diafine is another story. Doing that is all about the developing agent amounts and proportions in A and balancing the alkalinity of B while still getting enough activity to give box speed or better with short ish Dev times.

clogz · Jun 22, 2021

You might try this 2 bath formula: http://theatreorgans.com/hammond/keng/kenhtml/crcnew.htm/greeley.htm

relistan · Jun 22, 2021

clogz said:
You might try this 2 bath formula: http://theatreorgans.com/hammond/keng/kenhtml/crcnew.htm/greeley.htm

That appears to be a concentrate in the divided D-23 family. Calculating out from the lower volume it seems to have about 25% less sulfite and about 30% more metol than Barry Thornton's two bath. Given the testing that @gorbas did in the thread I started, this developer will have even more carryover issues than BT's 2 bath because of the higher concentration of developing agent in A. This is then worked around by the recommendation of using a one-shot bath B from cheap carbonate concentrate, which is a good solution. I expect it will be sharper and grainier than BT2.

clogz · Jun 22, 2021

You're right. I find it cheap and cheerful as the A bath will keep for a long time. No problem with slightly grainy results.

relistan · Jun 23, 2021

clogz said:
You're right. I find it cheap and cheerful as the A bath will keep for a long time. No problem with slightly grainy results.

Yeah, my own 2B-1 two bath has even less sulfite so I was not throwing stones, just attempting to assess from the formula. Have any results you would like to share?

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 23, 2021

relistan said:
That appears to be a concentrate in the divided D-23 family.

It has a replenisher as well for the first bath!!

Alan Johnson · Jun 23, 2021

Here is a Diafine substitute formula that seems to be the result of studying data that is no longer available:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/diafine/discuss/72157699627118502/

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 23, 2021

Alan Johnson said:
Here is a Diafine substitute formula that seems to be the result of studying data that is no longer available:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/diafine/discuss/72157699627118502/

@doctorpepe might have more to say on this version. It's not clear to me why there's a borax part B as alternative to the metaborate and carbonate. It's not quite the same.

Alan Johnson · Jun 23, 2021

He appears to commend the carbonate version. It is not definitively stated what was in the old msds.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 23, 2021

Alan Johnson said:
it has also bicarbonate

Small amount of bicarbonate could be there in the carbonate part B to get a buffer that has the same pH as Metaborate based part B.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 23, 2021

Alan Johnson said:
It is not definitively stated what was in the old msds.

Have you seen this post by Gerry, this by @ParkerSmithPhoto and this by @doctorpepe? At least a few people have seen the MSDS that @doctorpepe mentioned on Flickr and have commented on it. I wonder why @doctorpepe replaced Potassium Bromide with BTZ in his reformulation! Perhaps influenced by the comments made by @michael_r on restrainer for Diafine-like developers?

Alan Johnson · Jun 23, 2021

Thanks Raghu,
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/diafine-home-brew.120030/page-2#post-1590479
This seems to be nearly right, except that the later version uses bisulfite rather than citric acid and the phosphate should be sodium hexametaphosphate.
IMO it appears the best estimate so far for the Diafine formula is as given here:
Error in Diafine chemistry | Diafine | Flickr
Using the items listed Diafine A Bisulfite and Diafine B Carbonate.

doctorpepe · Jun 25, 2021

I had read in the literature that phenidone does not respond to bromide. Thus it woud make sense that, if one needed a restrainer, it would most likely be BZT.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · Jun 25, 2021

doctorpepe said:
I had read in the literature that phenidone does not respond to bromide. Thus it woud make sense that, if one needed a restrainer, it would most likely be BZT.

That makes perfect sense from the pov of restrainer except that the MSDS of Diafine reportedly had Potassium Bromide instead of BTZ. Was it a mistake by the formulators of Diafine to use Bromide or was there some specific purpose for using Bromide that we have failed to comprehend? BTW thanks so much for responding.

doctorpepe · Jun 25, 2021

Probably cost as bromide is relatively cheap, though ineffective in this case.

Diafine recipe

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