FWIW, your link doesn't work for me; it just goes to Adorama's home page.
Dead Link Removed works for me.
Kodak and Adorama do make it hard for hobbyists who are just starting out; those product descriptions are
awful! Conceptually, you need from two to four items (in addition to water, a developing tank, etc.):
- Developer
- Bleach
- Fixer
- Stabilizer or final rinse
The bleach and fixer can be combined into a single bath (blix), thus reducing the number of items to three. AFAIK all the kits that are marketed for hobbyists use blixes. Unfortunately, blixes don't work as well as separate bleach and fixer steps.
The stabilizer/final rinse step is optional (hence two or three steps if you omit it), but without it you're likely to get water marks -- this step is a lot like Photo Flo for B&W processing.
Dead Link Removed includes formalin or formaldehyde, which helps maintain image stability for older films. Newer films don't need this, so
Dead Link Removed omits it, but I believe it includes some other stuff besides Photo Flo. You can safely use stabilizer with both old and new films, but final rinse is best used only with newer films. OTOH, stabilizer is a bit nastier because of the formaldehyde, so you should be more careful about how you use it (wear gloves, for instance).
The developer and bleach both now seem to be sold only in starter and replenisher packaging, at least by Adorama. Officially, you'd use starter and add replenisher to get a working solution, and you could then dump some of that solution after processing and add more replenisher to restore proper activity. This is great for big commercial operations, but it's less than ideal for hobbyist use, where one-shot use is more convenient. (An exception: Bleach is pretty expensive, and it lasts a long time. I use bleach in a replenished way by dumping ~70ml per roll and adding bleach replenisher up to the original quantity.) I've only been following Kodak's product line changes rather casually, so I'm not sure if they still make products in the one-shot form. You could always buy some of the starter and replenisher for each of these from Adorama, but you'll end up buying
huge quantities -- for instance, 12.5 gallons is the minimum bleach replenisher size.
The fixer, stabilizer, and final rinse descriptions at Adorama all mark the products as being replenishers, with no starter product listed. AFAIK, these are all suitable for use directly; just ignore the word "replenisher" in the item descriptions. I've heard of people using bleach replenisher without starter, but I didn't pay too much attention to those discussions, so I don't know what the best procedure is or if there are significant caveats.
I haven't checked them recently, but
Calumet and
Unique Photo have both sold Kodak C-41 chemistry in the past, so you might try them.
Another alternative is non-Kodak C-41 chemistry.
Freestyle sells Silver Pixel and Unicolor chemistry, including separate bleach and fixer (although only in fairly large quantities). An eBay seller called
bigalfish also sells Silver Pixel chemistry.
B&H sells Tetenal kits, but they use a blix rather than separate bleach and fixer. (B&H also sells Kodak chemistry, but won't ship some items.)
Overall, you may want to start out with a hobbyist kit, despite the fact that it uses a blix. This will enable you to familiarize yourself with the process without investing in hundreds of dollars of oversized products that you may not use if you decide not to continue, or that might go bad before you can use it even if you do continue. If you decide you want to keep doing C-41, you'll be able to either keep buying the kit if you're satisfied with it or switch to something with separate bleach and fixer. FWIW, I personally use a mix-it-yourself C-41 developer (since that's what goes bad most quickly and I don't want to buy one of those huge 5-gallon kits of the stuff) with store-bought bleach and fixer.
