Fine Grain Developer - 1940 "The Camera" Lucerne.

[Ian Grant]

Ian Grant submitted a new resource:

(there was a url link here which no longer exists) - Fine Grain Developer - 1940 "The Camera" Lucerne.

THE BRITISH JOURNAL PHOTOGRAPHIC ALMANAC, 1941. 148/9


An Inexpensive Fine-grain Developer. The following is an inexpensive fine-grain developer which is stated never the- less to give very excellent results.


Metol. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 gms.
Sodium sulphite (anhydrous). . . . . . . . . . . 136 gms.
Kodalk / Sodium Metaborate . . . . . . . . . . .57 gms.
Potassium bromide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12½ gms.
Water to . . . . . . . ....

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

 

[Mike Wilde]

interesting. Kind of like D-23, with a bit more alkalinity, and quite a fair chunk more of restrianer. I only ever recall that much bromide per litre with strong lith film developers (it might have been called D-85?) of a much higher pH

 

[Ian Grant]

Mike, it has to be remembered that this is a concentrate so the Bromide's not that high when dilute and the Sulphite level is approx 15% that of D23/DK20/Microdol/D76 etc.

The working solution is:

Metol. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 gms.
Sodium sulphite (anhydrous). . . . . . . . . . . 15.1 gms.
Kodalk / Sodium Metaborate . . . . . . . . . . . 6.33 gms.
Potassium bromide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.38 gms.
Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 litre

That then makes more sense.

Ian

 

[Mike Wilde]

Sorry, Ian, missed the concentrate bit in my initial early morning scan of the text, and obviously too hasty a reply.

 

[Ian Grant]

Well the amount of Sulphite is relatively high in comparison to Beutler's High Definition developer, 15 g/litre as opposed to 5 g/litre in the working solutions D23 or D76 at 1+3 would be 25 g/litre

If we take Beutler as the one extreme - Metol with a low sulphite level and the D76/D23 high Sulphite level as the other then this developer fits somewhere in the middle. The relationship between sulphite level and fine grain isn't prportional.

This was probably a fine grain developer of it's time relative to older developer formula. It has to be remembered that until 35mm film usage became wide spread most film developers were like D72 or Pyro based and people developed to very much higher gammas and densities.

Kodak Research only published their first Fine grain developer in 1927 followed by D76 as a cine developer (not recommended at that point for still cameras). This developer was published in 1940, D23/D25 were only published in 19444.

These days D76/ID-11 which was in effect an Open Sorce formula is taken as the benchmark to compare other Fine grain developers against, by the 1940's and 50's nearly every manufacturer made it - Defender 6, Foma FV3, Forte FD20, Foton N12, M&B 320 are just some of the names it was sold under. It became a standard because the Movie industry needed standardised processing regardless of where films were processed around the world.

I wouldn't give this particular formula to much importance as it is but by switching to Potassium Sulphite (because of it's higher solubility) and increasing the Sulphite level you would get you closer to some commercial one shot concentated developers.

Ian

 

[Trask]

Same weight Potassium Sulphite as for Sodium Sulphite, do you think?

 

[Ian Grant]

You'd need to use slightly more as it has a higher MW, so x1.25.

Ian

 

[albada]

PhotoFormulary.com sells a 45% aqueous concentrate of Potassium sulfite. My calculations say that 10 grams of Sodium sulfite corresponds to 27.9 ml of this 45% Potassium sulfite.

Mark Overton

 

[nworth]

A more interesting comparison may be to DK-50, which was considered not to be a fine grain developer, but to produce moderately fine grain in its era:

Metol 2.5 g
Sodium sulfite (anh) 30 g
Hydroquinone 2.5 g
Sodium metaborate 10 g
Potassium bromide 500 mg
WTM 1 l

DK-50 has about half the metol and bromide and about twice the metaborate and sulfite (very roughly).

The sulfite in the BJ formula is not sufficient to exercise very much solvent effect, so the fine grain must come from the metol and bromide acting together.

 

[Ian Grant]

It's perhaps worth looking at the Dilute DK-50 formula that was in use in the early 1960's as this is closer to the formula here. Geoffrey Crawley puublished it in his series of artcles 1960/61 on Developers in the BJP it was in subsequent Anuals for many years in the Fornulae section.

DK-50 is one of Kodak's variations/evolutions of the earlier Wellington & Ward Buffered Borax formula, lurking somewhere in an obscure publication there's probably a Borax version D-50. Kodak tried and published a few Sodium Metaborate (Kodalk) buffered versions of common formulae including DK76 and DK76b.

Ian