FX-37 & TMX 100

[Andrew O'Neill]

The final instalment... It's really short, and has nice music!

 

[Alan Johnson]

Scanner?
Does the scanner have a true resolution around 2400 dpi = 47lppm? (V700,800).
Crawley said that FX-37 can be regarded as a sharpened up version of D-76 and was the nearest to FX-39.
Scanning with 47lppm would just smear out the larger grain of FX-37.

It may well do better in 35 mm with an 80 lppm scanner?

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Scanner?
Does the scanner have a true resolution around 2400 dpi = 47lppm? (V700,800).
Crawley said that FX-37 can be regarded as a sharpened up version of D-76 and was the nearest to FX-39.
Scanning with 47lppm would just smear out the larger grain of FX-37.

It may well do better in 35 mm with an 80 lppm scanner?

I scanned at 1200 with a V750.

 

[John Wiegerink]

I played around with FX-37 for a bit and found it to be a very good "honest" developer. It doesn't "mush" grain and seems, at least to me anyway, pretty honest in the film speed department. Still, like Andy's example shows, it was no better than Xtol-R for me and I gave up on it. Plus, my Xtol-R last nearly forever and FX-37 doesn't. It's going to take an earth shaking film developer to get me to switch from Xtol-R (actually Adox XT-3R) and my favorite staining developer Pyrocat-HDC. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

I played around with FX-37 for a bit and found it to be a very good "honest" developer. It doesn't "mush" grain and seems, at least to me anyway, pretty honest in the film speed department. Still, like Andy's example shows, it was no better than Xtol-R for me and I gave up on it. Plus, my Xtol-R last nearly forever and FX-37 doesn't. It's going to take an earth shaking film developer to get me to switch from Xtol-R (actually Adox XT-3R) and my favorite staining developer Pyrocat-HDC. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

Agreed. It's pretty hard to beat those two developers, Xtol and Pyrocat.

 

[retina_restoration]

With sheet films (FP4, CHS 100 II, Fomapan 100, etc) I found FX-37 rendered the higher values with a harshness (coarse tonality) that brought me to the opinion that it wasn't worth pursuing. If you like a more graphic look to your work (edgy, hard tones) then it might be fine. It does deliver a bit of a speed boost (1/3 to 1/2 stop IME) but it wasn't worth the speed gain when it failed in terms of tonal rendering.
As others have stated, its hard to beat Xtol or the Pyro developers (My choice is still PMK)

 

[Sal Santamaura]

I've never used FX-37, but did recently compare TMX in XTOL 1+1 to FX-39 II. The results were very similar to yours, Andrew, which is why I don't understand how XTOL could be declared "winner." TMX is notoriously low in acutance. Both your and my negatives show a substantial increase in sharpness when processed in the FX developer. While I use XTOL with many other films, for TMX it's clearly the loser.