Non-solvent developer with high film speed

Gerald C Koch said:

I question applying 50 year old data to today's films. I certainly do not place Troop's book on the same level as say that of Grant Haist. Of course the books were written with a different intent in mind. But that does not excuse Troop from using the most up to date material.

As far as I have been able to determine Crawley had no technical training. So his formulas might best be described as the work of a skilled amateur. In this he would have been continuing a long tradition at the BJP.

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Another "skilled amateur" who experimented was Barry Thornton. In "Edge of Darkness"(2000) p90 he says of FX-1 that if anything it gives speed greater than standard.This claim of a speed increase with FX-1 is repeated in Photoformulary current technical data sheet for it.I don't dispute the quality of Haist's books but does he even mention the effect of acutance developers on EI?

Another "skilled amateur" who experimented was Barry Thornton. In "Edge of Darkness"(2000) p90 he says of FX-1 that if anything it gives speed greater than standard

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Thornton's book and others like it do a disservice to photography. They make clains with little or not technical foundation.

Acutance developers like FX-1 and the Beutler, if used as intended, require the thinnest possible negative with good shadow detail. In this respect they use the 1 stop latitude toward under-exposure inherent in a film. Having used the Beutler developer extensively in past years I can attest to this. But any perceived increase in speed is a fiction and there is no increase in shadow detail. A bit of jiggery-pokery and nothing more.

Of course this has nothing to do with a true speed increase as produced by a phenidone based developer. You can search not only thru Haist but also Mason, Glafkides and others. No metol based developer has ever been proved to produces a true speed increase.

SPUR SLD?

Philippe Grunchec said:

SPUR SLD?

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I could not find an MSDS for this developer. So it's anyone's guess just what it contains.

Until Kendall's discovery of phenidone, speed increasing developers were a thing of the imagination. There were many false claims. It's not that people didn't try. Just that no one was successful.

I would suggest you try DDX first. Ilfords own recommendations are that at EI 800 you need use only 10 mins for development. That is only 1 minute more than is recommended when using EI 400. That is only just over 11% addition of time and that will add only a small amount of additional contrast. Whether you wil lose a full stop of shadow detail I don't know because I haven't tried it but I expect you'll lose 1/2 a stop or so. I rekon DDX probably gives you an extra 1/3 of a stop over 400 anyway.

If you want a real speed increase then Microphen will be the best choice. Until you try the simple options of these two developers you won't know if they will give you what you're chasing. You are assuming they won't and are assuming some other developers will. I think you may be incorrect.
And DDX is a tad more grainy than ID11 and gives good acutance.

p.s. HC110 tends to give an upswept curve which effectively means higher contrast in the highlights. Pushing that will make that contrast higher. And if you dilute it, you will lose effective film speed. So I wouldn't recommend HC110 for your purposes.

Gerald,
In his early 1960s papers Crawley sometimes gave speed increase as a measure of how much the meter setting should be increased.Assuming he consistently used this definition he would get the 80% increase figure for FX-1.
Is this still inconsistent with your results or is your use of the word speed different?

Alan Johnson said:

Gerald,
In his early 1960s papers Crawley sometimes gave speed increase as a measure of how much the meter setting should be increased.Assuming he consistently used this definition he would get the 80% increase figure for FX-1.
Is this still inconsistent with your results or is your use of the word speed different?

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Since exposure control is in 1/3 stop increments I find that easier to use than percemt. Essentially what I did with the Beutler formula. With Pan-X I would set the meter to an EI of 64. What I would get was a thin negative that printed using grade 3. Since I was within the latitude of the film shadow detail was not affected. Still it was not a true speed increase. A true speed increase would have created a normal density negative that printed on grade 2.

Some of the most spectacular negatives were created with the Pan-X/Beutler combination. Of all the lost Kodak films I miss Pan-X the most.

Michael R 1974 said:

Rob, DDX does give excellent emulsion speed, but according to Ilford it is less suitable than ID-11 for "sharpness". Diluting it more might be something to try for a slight increase in sharpness (perhaps) if one is willing to settle for more grain. I don't know how well that would work.

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You may be correct considering HP5 is not a T-Grain film and DDX was formulated specifically for the Delta T-Grain films to give them a kick in the shadows.

Michael, my point about speed increasing developers having to wait for the discovery of phenidone is straight from Mason.

If you have a step wedge speed increasing is woooooooop?

Gerald C Koch said:

Since exposure control is in 1/3 stop increments I find that easier to use than percemt. Essentially what I did with the Beutler formula. With Pan-X I would set the meter to an EI of 64. What I would get was a thin negative that printed using grade 3. Since I was within the latitude of the film shadow detail was not affected. Still it was not a true speed increase. A true speed increase would have created a normal density negative that printed on grade 2.

Some of the most spectacular negatives were created with the Pan-X/Beutler combination. Of all the lost Kodak films I miss Pan-X the most.

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Appears you are using ISO speed and Crawley refers to Personal EI speed.The EI for your Panatomic-X is a 100% speed increase in Crawley's terminology, there is no disagreement with Crawley, Troop and others if you use their definition.

Gerald C Koch said:

I could not find an MSDS for this developer.

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No guesswork needed:

http://www.fotoimpex.de/shopen/chemistry/spur-sld-developer-500-ml.html

click sicherheitsdatenblatt (can't c/p the link directly:confused

miha said:

No guesswork needed:

http://www.fotoimpex.de/shopen/chemistry/spur-sld-developer-500-ml.html

click sicherheitsdatenblatt (can't c/p the link directly:confused

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Thanks for the information.

This developer contains a phenidone derivative and potassium hdroquinone monosulfonate as developing agents. The latter agent is a weak, soft-working developer that SPUR seems to like using in many of its developers.

Alan Johnson said:

Appears you are using ISO speed and Crawley refers to Personal EI speed.The EI for your Panatomic-X is a 100% speed increase in Crawley's terminology, there is no disagreement with Crawley, Troop and others if you use their definition.

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I think we are arguing symantics here. However by any definition the film was underexposed by 1 stop and the developing method was not intended to correct this. Any sensitometry data would show this. This was done to provide a thin negative with greater acutane and finer grain. This is not what one would get from a speed increasing developer and not what Crawley, et al seem to imply. Had a speed increasing developer like Acufine or Microphen been used then the results would have been very different. I still agree with Mason that only a phenidone based developer can provide a true speed increase.

Words are funny things. How we think of something is determined by how we speak of it. While the concept of exposure index EI can be useful the term obscures what is really happening. Whether you use the term rather than ISO the film is being under- or over-exposed. The latter two terms better describe what is happening.

If the OP is just looking for some developers to try, I'd try these (in this order): DK50, D19, D72. All of them are easily mixed at home if you have the basic set of photo chemicals. None of them were considered commercially well suited to 35mm because they are anything but "fine grain" developers. But none of them should cost you any speed, might bump apparent speed a bit and should give good acutance. D72 (similar to Dektol) is basically a paper developer (and my standard paper developer.) The first rolls of film I ever processed were 127 Verichrome Pan in D72 (because that's what came in the Kodak Tri-Chem Pack that my local Rexall stocked back in 1963.) A few years later I found a can of DK50 and gave that a whirl, but I was seduced by Acufine and Ethol UFG because all I wanted to shoot was a black cat in a coal bin at night with Tri-X. Didn't have much luck with that, and I have lots of thin negs to prove it. Speed's in the film, but developers (and technique) can give you the look you want if you keep looking.

Film does not have a "Speed" at all.

Film has "Sensiitivity" to light and that sensitivity detemines how it reacts to being hit by light.

"Speed" is what developers can extract from exposed film based on standards such as ISO which require specific target results to be obtained.

EI is a deviation of ISO "Speed" caused by using other developer and/or processing than that which the manufacturer used for its ISO conforming test results.

Is it really so difficult to grasp?

Just becasue the physics and chemistry only allows a smallish deviation of speed from what the sensitivity can capture doesn't make film suddenly have a fixed speed since it has none at all in the first place. Speed is not a physical property of film. Speed is an artificial construct after the event of exposure for our covenience of thinking about it.

Just like we accept that electromagnetic waves can be red blue or green. In reality, colour is not a property of an electromagnetic wave but we percieve it as having colour in our minds.

I would add that there are films designed to react to speed increasing developers.

If you take Delta 3200 you will find thats its published ISO speed is 1000. However, the ISO test is done using ID11.
Delta 3200 is designed as a naturally low contrast film so that when you push it with a speed increasing developer such as Microphen, you increase the contrast to NORMAL. And that means you can push it more than standard ISO 100 and 400 films. And infact if you use EI 3200 with Microphen you will achieve a normal contrast result with an 8 stop range, 4 below (spot metered) and 4 above. I've done the tests and plotted the curves and it gives a result which fits the ISO standard. So for this film you can get a 1 2/3 stop speed increase from the ISO with normal contrast because it is designed to work that way.
If the ISO tests had been done with Microphen it would have an ISO speed of 3200 but they weren't.
Delta 3200 deved in DDX gave me an EI of 1600. If I had pushed it to 3200 I would have got above normal contrast.

So this is a very flexible film which can be used for normal contrast between EI 800 (Perceptol) and EI 3200(Microphen). Thats a 2 stop speed variation depending on developer used.

And its with Ilfords own developers without resorting to "hybrid" formulas.

Whether grain at 3200 is acceptable is another matter.


Just so you are not under any illusions, I'm saying this is achievable without sacrificing shadow detail, i.e. at least 4 stops below metered value.

ulysses said:

If the OP is just looking for some developers to try, I'd try these (in this order): DK50, D19, D72. All of them are easily mixed at home if you have the basic set of photo chemicals. None of them were considered commercially well suited to 35mm because they are anything but "fine grain" developers. But none of them should cost you any speed, might bump apparent speed a bit and should give good acutance. D72 (similar to Dektol) is basically a paper developer (and my standard paper developer.) The first rolls of film I ever processed were 127 Verichrome Pan in D72 (because that's what came in the Kodak Tri-Chem Pack that my local Rexall stocked back in 1963.) A few years later I found a can of DK50 and gave that a whirl, but I was seduced by Acufine and Ethol UFG because all I wanted to shoot was a black cat in a coal bin at night with Tri-X. Didn't have much luck with that, and I have lots of thin negs to prove it. Speed's in the film, but developers (and technique) can give you the look you want if you keep looking.

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It's my observation that developers have a lot less to do with grain that the mythology dictates.

I recently posted my own DK-50 experiment with Plus-X here: (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

True, I didn't try it with Tri-X, I guess I should. But OTOH, I don't have a database to try compare against. I guess that in a perfect world, I'd try it in Dektol, too.

To OP,

If you are going to be scanning to print then you may want to consider using XP2 film which is available in bulk rolls and will probably scan better than HP5