Do rotary processors affect how the film looks in the end? (tonality, film speed / shadow detail, etc.)

Milpool said:

It was specific to developing Tech Pan roll films (small tank) in Technidol. The agitation instructions were to shake the tank up and down something like 10 times in 2 seconds for each cycle.

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Tech Pan is a film that is very sensitive to agitation technique. Most general purpose B&W films are not nearly as sensitive to technique as TP is.

dcy said:

Never thought of processing paper on a tube. I might give it a try. --- Still not gonna buy a Jobo, but as @GregY said, you can just roll the tube on the counter.

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Tubes are great for large prints. A piece of 16x20 or larger needs to be handled very carefully to avoid creases. Bring the chemistry to paper in a tube, instead of the paper to the chemistry in trays helps ensure a crease free print.

For colour prints, tubes are about the only way to go for low volume use, or a roller transport machine for higher volumes.

From 1m 40" how to agitate by inversion

Again, I didn't find Tech Pan fussy at all, in any film size. Technidol seems to have been the problem.

MattKing said:

For clarity, there are two things you are attempting to accomplish:
1) you want to be sure that the development and other steps of the process are not uneven; and
2) you want to be sure that the results of the development and other steps of the process are consistent from roll to roll.
I find that the two hand method is good for ensuring both, because it is fairly easy to apply repeatably.
Repeatability is the strong suit of rotary processors - that is why I use it for most of my film development workflow.

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I rate development consistency very highly.

Sirius Glass said:

I rate development consistency very highly.

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I find consistency is attained by repeated experience with one's chosen tools (no matter how simple or hi-tech) and workflow

dcy said:

Thanks!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand more. I kind of envy people who learned this in the classroom. For a question like "how do you agitate", the teacher could say "let me just show you".

I'm going to follow your method from here on (except I'll use two hands because my tank is bigger, and invert a full 180° because that's just natural with two hands). That's more or less what I was already doing. I was also varying the direction that I inverted the tank in, but seeing your video and the comments from Matt and others, that's clearly not needed.

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Thanks! And why view counts are meaningless. It’s who sees it that matters.

I mentioned uneven development.

First two frames of one of the rolls in that tank are I think shots taken pointing at the sky. When scanned, the scanner tried hard to create a gray balanced picture. You can see with contrast exaggerating the tones, the dMax varies. It would not be very evident in most prints except the top and bottom higher density tendency is visible in some pictures if you look for it.

p.s. Looks like a tiny bit of capping. I have been struggling with this ES-II and this is a tell-tale sign I need to go deeper into CLA territory than I wanted to go.

Bill, looks like you have a little uneven developing happening around the sprocket holes holes, too.

Two words: Unsufficient Agitation. I couldn’t get rid with a less pronounced gradient in 120 and had too switch from Jobo 1500 to Jobo 2500 where the spirals have a greater distance to each other. That fixed it for me.

loccdor said:

. They have a sub dedicated to making fun of them, AnalogCircleJerk, which I find entertaining.

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Wow. Thanks for that.

Craig said:

Tubes are great for large prints. A piece of 16x20 or larger needs to be handled very carefully to avoid creases. Bring the chemistry to paper in a tube, instead of the paper to the chemistry in trays helps ensure a crease free print.

For colour prints, tubes are about the only way to go for low volume use, or a roller transport machine for higher volumes.

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I started on a K16 process system for colour with remarkable success and if I wanted to do colour again I would purchase one of these units and have fun like it was 1974 again.

DREW WILEY said:

Again, I didn't find Tech Pan fussy at all, in any film size. Technidol seems to have been the problem.

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Techpan was a document-film never intended to halftone-imaging. Special processes made it suitable for this application and Technidol was Kodak's recommended solution and both together you have a finnicy process. In my view you cannot easily discount the contrasty film as part of the equation. Some developers may have made things easier like Tetenal's Ultrafin Doku, which I also used without any trouble, but those work nevertheless, not because it is about Techpan.

I used TechPan mostly for forensic purposes, all the way from 35mm to 8X10, both high contrast and reduced contrast using special developers (but not Technidol). I had friends who routinely shot TechPan for pictorial purposes; but their prints always suffered from its characteristic "soot and chalk" loss of gradation in both the highlights and shadows. I too knew how to make TechPan work pictorially, but why?, when there are many much better films for that application. I did, however, go through a brief phase testing it for general usage.

But, let me repeat, I NEVER found TechPan fussy to develop, or got streaky results. As far as TD3 developer goes, I never tested it in relation to any other film, so wouldn't know what to expect in that case. It's all ancient history now.

Tech Pan was exactly that - Technical Pan. It had a lot of commercial applications in forensics (like art fraud sleuthing), astronomy, panchromatic highlight masking in relation to color printing, and in 35mm for title slides.
Documentation microfilm was something else.

Its adoption as a pictorial film seems to have begun with that old BS Kodak ad which claimed "4X5 quality with a 35mm camera". ... Well, guess if you were comparing it to the most warped sheet film holder you could find, and the grainiest film ever made, and a lens with cobwebs in it.