Expired HC-110

cdholden · May 14, 2006

I ran across a bottle of HC-110, unopened and still sealed, but expired. Date of expiration shows June 2005, but the bottle itself says sealed bottle (concentrate) will last indefinitely. Once opened, how long can I expect the concentrate (not stock) to last?
Chris

Tom Hoskinson · May 14, 2006

As long as no water gets into the concentrate after the bottle is opened, it will last for a very long time (typically for years).

kjsphoto · May 14, 2006

Go ahead and use it. This stuff last forever. I used some HC110 that was years old and it was fine. Just to be safe run a test roll or test sheet and see how it prints.

Kev

Donald Qualls · May 15, 2006

I routinely take more than a year to use up a bottle of concentrate. I do divide it up into smaller containers when I open the bottle -- I use some 4 ounce juice bottles I got with grape juice in them a while back (cheaper than anything I could find empty), and when I got a larger bottle of HC-110 syrup, I filled a glass jar (from jalapeno pepper slices -- rubber gasketed cam-lock lid, makes a nice seal and is coated on the inside to keep metal away from the concentrate) before starting on the plastic bottles.

Keep the concentrate in a sealed container and don't let water or moist air in, and it'll last "indefinitely" just like the unopened original bottle does.

donbga · May 15, 2006

Donald Qualls said:
II do divide it up into smaller containers when I open the bottle --

This is totally unnecessary. A partially filled bottle of HC110 will last years. I tested a partial bottle that was almost 4 years old against a fresh bottle and there were no differences in the results. My comparison test was made with two rolls of 135 film identically exposed, with frames exposed in 1/2 stop variations of a gray card.

Each roll measured virtually the same on my densitometer. That was good enough for me.

Samuel B · May 15, 2006

I agree, undiluted HC-110 seems to last forever.
The use by date on HC-110 is overly pessimistic, or maybe Kodak just wants you to buy some more before you need to.

jim appleyard · May 15, 2006

I'm still working on a bottle of HC-110 that is who knows how old. Works fine!

joneil · May 15, 2006

I have an opened bottle of HC-110 in concentrate form older than than yours , and it is just fine. In fact, I was using it yesterday.

Mixed with water, it has a short shelf life, but in concentrate it is very long lived, perhpas the longest lasting of all B&W developers.

joe

Papa Tango · May 15, 2006

Sort of like soup...

I sometimes wonder where manufacturers come up with the expiration dates, or "best sold by" dates. The only things I have found that really have meaning for this are milk and meat. But then I have known folks that go through their cabinets, and throw out any canned goods as soon as they pass the date on the top...

I have a bottle of HC110 that I cracked open for a HABS project three years ago. Not using this developer often enough to mix a working stock batch, it is made on an as needed basis. Did a roll of plus x a couple weeks ago, and the stuff is as good as ever. Dont try to keep a mixed solution more than a couple months though...

aoresteen · May 15, 2006

HC110 keeps for a very very long time. The ONLY Kodak chemical that I have had problems with using when old is DEKTOL. Fixer, D76 ect all last way way beyond the stated "shelf life". I think Kodak uses early shelf lifes to force product turnover and increase sales.

Donald Qualls · May 15, 2006

donbga said:
This is totally unnecessary. A partially filled bottle of HC110 will last years.

Oh, I completely agree -- I do it more for the convenience of having bottles in which my syringe will reach the bottom than because I think it's a necessary action to protect the developer. OTOH, if I'm going to divide it up, there's no reason to push my luck -- might as well store it well.

Next time I buy a bottle, I might just get one of those oral syringes from the local pharmacy and just turn the original bottle upside down to get the syrup into the syringe through the special stopper. I can see some advantage in having the original label.

Say, I should check the little bottle of HC-110 stock solution I have -- it's been there, lid tightly closed with a half inch of airspace in the top of a 4 ounce bottle, for coming on two years. Hasn't changed color at all. I made it because it was too hard to measure the concentrate to make two ounces of Dilution G for microfilm in a minimum capacity tank (shooting in Minolta 16). Even with a syringe, half a ml of concentrate is a bit tricky. But then, I found other developers that I liked better with those microfilms, and the stock solution just sat there...

df cardwell · May 15, 2006

Nobody but me think the long life beyond expiration date is a GOOD thing, not a conspiracy ?

Of course, none of US would think of suing Kodak for our own screw-ups, right ?

Classics include, "I gave you color slides for processing ! I'm going to sue Kodak for turning them into B&W negatives !".

And he did, too. Didn't get very far with it ( proabably because he didn't have a California jury !), but it's that sort of idiotic 'consumer activism' that led to an ultra conservative expiration date on your HC-110.

.

Jim Jones · May 15, 2006

The date the camera store put on the price tag of my HC-110 is 3-29-90. That sounds about right for the expiration date, since I bought the bottle maybe a few years earlier. That partly used bottle still seems good, although I haven't done a side-by-side comparison with fresh HC-

df cardwell · May 15, 2006

Sounds like good design to me, Jim !

MattKing · May 16, 2006

df cardwell said:
Of course, none of US would think of suing Kodak for our own screw-ups, right ?

Classics include, "I gave you color slides for processing ! I'm going to sue Kodak for turning them into B&W negatives !".

And he did, too. Didn't get very far with it ( proabably because he didn't have a California jury !), but it's that sort of idiotic 'consumer activism' that led to an ultra conservative expiration date on your HC-110.

.

As I've mentioned a few times before, my Dad worked for many years for Canadian Kodak. I can clearly remember a time in the early 1970s when a neighbour came up to him and complained indignantly that Kodak had ruined his roll of (slide or movie) film. Dad calmed him down, and then offered to take his film in to the lab to be checked.

The film was in bad shape, but the reason was pretty clear. All the photos were of Christmas vacations in Hawaii - three of them!

The neighbour had had the same roll in his camera for three years - six sets of exposure to the airport x-rays in the 1970s!

I think he got a free roll anyways from Kodak, along with some gentle hints about traveling with film.

It was, of course, clearly Kodak's fault :rolleyes:

On the subject of expiry dates, I think I have read somewhere that when manufacturers put date of manufacture, rather than expiry dates on product, even the most long lived products become much harder to sell even a few months later. There is obviously some advantage to having a relevant date on the product, and a conservative expiry date is preferable to an overly optimistic one.

Expiry dates are chosen to take into account "worst case scenarios". Certainly the expiry dating for amateur film was always designed to take into account that the film was likely to spend time in a window display in some drug store, rather than a carefully climate controlled environment.

Matt

Rolleijoe · May 16, 2006

"Longest lasting of all b&w developers"

joneil said:
I have an opened bottle of HC-110 in concentrate form older than than yours , and it is just fine. In fact, I was using it yesterday.

Mixed with water, it has a short shelf life, but in concentrate it is very long lived, perhpas the longest lasting of all B&W developers.

joe

I think Rodinal actually holds that honor. A friend of mine was a Signal Corps photog during the war, and told me of the time he found a whole stash of Rodinal that had a manufacture date in the early (pre 1918) 1900s. He gave it a try, and it was fine. That's almost 30yrs.

I did have a bottle of HC-110 go bad on me, when living in Maui, and EK actually mailed me a replacement bottle! My Rodinal never went bad, and after 8yrs, is still actually fine. However, I've bought a new bottle to preserve what is left from the "original" Rodinal as vs the "new" version.

I do have about 6 brown glass bottles of Microdol-X liquid which have been unopened, after I purchased a case of it a decade ago. Haven't had time to open one up and test it yet, may give it a whirl and see what happens. Tri-X always looked great in it.

Rollejoe

Gerald Koch · May 16, 2006

Donald Qualls said:
I do it more for the convenience of having bottles in which my syringe will reach the bottom than because I think it's a necessary action to protect the developer.

Try a short length of Tygon tubing that is used for the air lines of fish tanks to extend the reach of the syringe. Another source of somewhat narrower diameter is the tubing used for oxygen masks in hospitals. The mask and line come as a disposable kit.

raucousimages · May 16, 2006

I found a large stash of GAF Hyfinol (powder in cans to make 50+ Gal. of working solution) that must over 50 years old. My first tests on 4x5 plus-x look good. The same box contained cans of FotoFine that just turned papers a wierd red. The film and paper with it were dated 1952-1957. Including a 250 sheet box of 10x10 AZO that prints great. Go ahead and test the old stuff you find. I have let Boy Scouts use HC-110 that was over 10 years old with no noticeable problems other than the way they shoot.

esanford · May 16, 2006

HC110 has an expiration date....#$#%#???

John Bragg · May 16, 2006

The only failure I had with HC-110, was with the watered down "European" version. Needless to tell that I bought the full strength "Syrup" after that !!!
I think redesigned bottles were in fact to blame, with poorly fitting screw caps... J.B.

Donald Qualls · May 16, 2006

Gerald Koch said:
Try a short length of Tygon tubing that is used for the air lines of fish tanks to extend the reach of the syringe. Another source of somewhat narrower diameter is the tubing used for oxygen masks in hospitals. The mask and line come as a disposable kit.

\

My larger syringe came with a piece of that. Unfortunately, the tubing was such a poor fit on the syringe nose that it wouldn't draw, and with HC-110, there's a huge amount of waste from syrup that can't be cleared from the tube -- waste almost as great as the actual consumption, in the quantities I usually use.

Decanting the concentrate has worked fine for me, but I think the oral syringe with the stepped stopper, and inverting the syrup bottle, will work even better. Only costs $2 to try it, though it'll probably be another year before I open another new bottle of HC-110.

donbga · May 16, 2006

Donald Qualls said:
\

My larger syringe came with a piece of that. Unfortunately, the tubing was such a poor fit on the syringe nose that it wouldn't draw, and with HC-110, there's a huge amount of waste from syrup that can't be cleared from the tube -- waste almost as great as the actual consumption, in the quantities I usually use.

Decanting the concentrate has worked fine for me, but I think the oral syringe with the stepped stopper, and inverting the syrup bottle, will work even better. Only costs $2 to try it, though it'll probably be another year before I open another new bottle of HC-110.

Back in the days when Rodinal used to come in a glass bottle with a rubber stopper I used a hypodermic needle to extract the developer. Perhaps that could be done with HC-110.

gainer · May 17, 2006

donbga said:
Back in the days when Rodinal used to come in a glass bottle with a rubber stopper I used a hypodermic needle to extract the developer. Perhaps that could be done with HC-110.

The syringe with the stepped stopper is essentially that, but without the needle. I use a bunch of them, leaving the syringe in the stopper.
I don't know why we're talking about out-of-date HC110. I didn't know there was such a thing. I'll never know why Kodak didn't use the same idea on Xtol.

donbga · May 17, 2006

gainer said:
The syringe with the stepped stopper is essentially that, but without the needle. I use a bunch of them, leaving the syringe in the stopper.
I don't know why we're talking about out-of-date HC110. I didn't know there was such a thing. I'll never know why Kodak didn't use the same idea on Xtol.

You know I forgot all about the stepped stopper. I used to have one but can't recall why I quite using it.

As for the XTOL, didn't you write that glycol could not be used for mixing XTOL?

gainer · May 17, 2006

HC110 has all it would need if one substituted ascorbic acid for the hydroquinone. It contains an organic sulfite complex. HC110 can in fact be somewhat improved by adding ascorbate to the working solution just as with Rodinal. I wrote about this possibility some time ago in Photo Techniques. In view of what I have learned through Pyrocat MC, one does not need the HC110. Pyrocat MC is quite good whether you want the stain or not.

Expired HC-110

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