When Plus-X disappeared, I was well stocked, freezer wise, but I was worried what would happen when that was gone. I had hoped that 5222 aka Double X would be a worthy successor.
After many months of fiddling, testing, and printing, with a variety of films/developers, I have come to some general conclusions, I thought I'd share. These apply only to 35mm. I've not gotten around to testing much of my 120 stock. The "test" here was to make negatives, develop in different ways, and see what an 8x10 print looked like from that negative.
This is all anecdotal, and I'm hoping someone will chime in with "No, no, no, that's wrong, you do it THIS way...":
After many months of fiddling, testing, and printing, with a variety of films/developers, I have come to some general conclusions, I thought I'd share. These apply only to 35mm. I've not gotten around to testing much of my 120 stock. The "test" here was to make negatives, develop in different ways, and see what an 8x10 print looked like from that negative.
This is all anecdotal, and I'm hoping someone will chime in with "No, no, no, that's wrong, you do it THIS way...":
- Compared to pretty much all other similar speed films - Plus-X, Efke 100, FP4+, Fomapan 200 - Double X is not as inherently sharp. I could not get it to consistently give me the snap these other films had.
- Double X tends to creep towards overly contrasty if you don't mind your developer manners with care. It's not as bad as Fomapan 200 (which you REALLY have to watch), but it still likes to go toward higher Contrast Indexes than I like.
- No matter what I did, I could not get a great negative with Double-X in Pyro. I tried both PMK and Pyrocat-HD. In both cases, the negatives showed grain and I kind of tonal "grittiness" I found to be unpleasant.
- This problem got REALLY bad when I tried to use semistand or Extreme Minimal Agitation techniques with Pyrocat-HD, both of which rely on higher dilutions than ordinary development. No matter what dilution or duration I chose, the resulting grain/grit/contrast was really ugly. This is the only film where I have found this to be true.
- So, my general conclusion is that Double X doesn't like highly dilute acutance development. Period.
- Well .. sort of. I got pretty decent results - good grain and contrast - developing Double X in HC-110B for 6 min. HC-110B is a balance between acutance and managing grain and this turned out nicely.
- I had originally suspected that semistand/EMA was off the table for this film because of the horrorshow I found with using Pyrocat-HD with this film. To my surprise and happiness, EMA in D-23 1+3 for 30 min was just lovely. After an initial 90sec agitation, I agitated every 7.5 min and pulled the film at 30mins. The images were (relatively) sharp, highlights were well managed and shadows showed pretty nearly full box speed. When shooting into really big Subject Brightness Ranges, this is likely what I will use. (Let it be noted that going past 1+3 in dilution with this small a format is begging for more visible grain.)
- But the cleanest, lowest grain look I got out of this film was developing it conventionally in D-76 1:1 for 7.5 min. The negatives are (relatively) sharp, contrast is well controlled, and even fairly large SBRs get handled nicely. This is my default/goto for this film for most things now.
- No matter what, though, the film just is not as apparently sharp as, say, FP4+. This is especially the case because FP4+ thrives in high dilution development like EMA where edge sharpness can be enhanced a lot.
- But Double X has a place. It's a good "walking around" film for street work. The extra speed comes in handy.
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