PC-Sulfite: A simple developer giving XTOL-quality

Photo Engineer said:

I've stated before that stability in alkali goes up in the series Phenidone, Dimezone, and Dimezone S. The last word is that Dimezone S was the preferred agent and all new Kodak formulas would have used it. All Kodak instant films used it. Dimezone S is about the same in activity as the others. It appears to be less active, but that is partly due to the molecular weight compared to Phenidone.

I think that some scanned examples of films produced by this developer compared to Xtol would be useful.

PE

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Thanks for the comparison scans that Photo Engineer requested!

I'm glad to see that people continue to try things out -- experimentation is fun, IMHO.

Also -- is that a row of Konica RF cameras up there? Pretty impressive!

Responding to several posts at once...

dynachrome said:

I don't know what the advantage of this developer is.

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It's easy to mix (assuming you've pre-dissolved phenidone in something), and its grain is as fine as XTOL's. PC-TEA is more convenient and stable, but it has coarser grain. But this developer has the severe disadvantage of short shelf-life, so its appeal is the wonder that something so simple could produce great image-quality. XTOL is more practical because it lasts for 6 months or more.

Trask said:

Also -- is that a row of Konica RF cameras up there? Pretty impressive!

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Gotta love those classic Konica RF cameras. Top quality, solid build, great optics, and a practical front film-advance. I wish that their front-advance had won in the market instead of the clumsier top-right advance-lever.

Ryuji said:

It's not new.

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I'd like to give credit to where credit is due, so please provide a link or specific reference to an independent report of this formula.

Ryuji said:

I don't know why you didn't see me saying it.

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Sorry, I didn't see where you said it in this thread (even upon re-read), and I missed your statement about it in some other thread. I'm sure you will provide a link to where you said you were aware of this formula.

Mark Overton

Mark I think it would be better and more practical if you make test strings of at least 3 exposures, box speed, minus 1 and plus one.

I'm lucky to have a hiQ camera body a Canon EOS 50e that let me do that automatically, makes test pictures from specific objetc, with sun (light here at this time of year, close to the polkar regions) against sun sidelighted open areas etc etc, I quickly burn a film with 5 separate triplets with space in the middle and repeat the same 5 subjects, cut the film in half and can test two developers under identical conditions.

I secured 4 films like that within 15 minutes just before Christmas, and still have films to go.

Doing it like that you test film-exposure-developer easier, and contrary to whats been said here, what interest us are PICTURES, not density curves, this is for practical experimenteres as far as I'm concerned, we are neither concerned with overly long storage capacities nor with hard to get chemicals....

analog what is that? said:

Mark I think it would be better and more practical if you make test strings of at least 3 exposures, box speed, minus 1 and plus one.

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Well, before that, the contrast needs to be matched.

Well yes that is hard because contrast varies every day, every minute, and every mont and with every season, I think its fair to say that contrast is never the same at the same spot, twice in a lifetime.....

But then we have the question : WHAT ARE THESE CAMERAS, FILMS AND DEVELOPER F.O.R.?

I use my equipment to record everday incidents, being interested in local history, my negative files are a treasure.
I want the best pictures possible of that.

I do not make pictures in a lab, of inanimate test objects.

So if a film/developer combination works in that environment its OK by me, for my purpose.

analog what is that? said:

I use my equipment to record everday incidents

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Some good news: Tri-X (TX) also works well with this developer. I walked around the neighborhood this morning, in a short-sleeved shirt, taking pictures of miserable people trudging through the snow here in the southern California winter. Here's a scan and full-resolution crop:

And a crop:

This is why we tolerate earthquakes and wildfires. Anyway, the scan has the black-point at the left side of the histogram, so you can still see grain in the darkest shadows. White-point is as high as possible, and gamma is 1.0. The scan is unmodified, not even any fixes for scratches or dust.

Density, contrast and grain all look fine to me. This verifies that this developer works well with both T-grain and conventional-grain films. At least Tmax-400 and Tri-X anyway.

A little warning: The developer was slightly yellow after using it, probably indicating that it was feeling tired, so only use it one-shot!

The camera was an Olympus Trip-35, modified to give manual control over its two shutter-speeds. Hold it rightside-up to get 1/40th, and upside-down to get 1/200th. That even works in the two vertical orientations. The Trip is a fun little walk-about camera.

Mark Overton

I know some people in the past have modified PC-TEA or PC-Glycol by adding sulfite in the quest for finer grain. (Reports differ on whether it works; I've never tried because the grain with PC-TEA doesn't bother me.) It seems to me that you've basically made an instant version of that same developer---in that sense I guess I wouldn't say it's really "new" so much as a variation of something existing.

It's interesting, especially the rough-and-ready compensation you described between the level of AA and the pH. It does seem less efficient with developing agents than the organic-solvent developers are; 3 l of PC-Sulfite contains about the same amount of AA as 5 l of PC-TEA 1+50, and a *lot* more phenidone.

Have you tried it without the sulfite, to see how much grain benefit it's conferring?

-NT

ntenny said:

It seems to me that you've basically made an instant version of that same developer---in that sense I guess I wouldn't say it's really "new" so much as a variation of something existing.

It's interesting, especially the rough-and-ready compensation you described between the level of AA and the pH. It does seem less efficient with developing agents than the organic-solvent developers are; 3 l of PC-Sulfite contains about the same amount of AA as 5 l of PC-TEA 1+50, and a *lot* more phenidone.

Have you tried it without the sulfite, to see how much grain benefit it's conferring?

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Funny you should ask. Replacing the sulfite with TEA is exactly what I tried last night, and it failed. Here's a question I posted about this on the DS-10 thread:
Take a look. It's an interesting failure.

I'm keeping the pH lower than PC-TEA in order to get finer grain, and that means I must use more ascorbic acid and phenidone to get the same dev-time. The phenidone I'm using is the same as the dimezone-s-equivalent for XTOL.

And yes, this PC-Sulfite is similar to PC-Glycol, but using sulfite instead of carbonate, and removing the glycol carrier. But the proportions of developers and the pH are quite different also, which is enough changes that... it's a different animal.

And so far, looking like a well-behaved animal.

Mark Overton

Michael R 1974 said:

Mark, have you looked at "E76"? I can't remember who formulated it but it's one of the D76-type variants listed in Anchell's Darkroom Cookbook. It seems similar to yours in its formulation except it has more AA, and an alkali.

100g sodium sulfite
.2g Phenidone
8g AA
Xg Borax (I can't remember how much)

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I'd forgotten about that formula. It's even in my developers file, and I still managed to forget. Here's the formula I have for it:
You're right. Take E-76, eliminate the Borax and reduce the AA to compensate (the phenidone is also a little different), and you have PC-Sulfite.
Thanks for pointing this out.

Mark Overton

Michael R 1974 said:

What do you suppose the difference, if any, would be? I would have thought E76 might be a little more active than PC Sulfite, slightly higher graininess than PC Sulfite, and perhaps slightly higher speed, but perhaps the differences would be too small to be considered more than trivial. Not sure.

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I think the big question is: What pH does E-76 operate at? If it's near 8.3, then I doubt folks could tell any difference between PC-Sulfite and E-76. 90 vs 100g of sulfite won't matter, and 0.15 vs 0.2g of phenidone means a shorter dev-time for E-76, with unknown boost of grain.

BTW, the pH of PC-Sulfite is sensitive to the amount of sodium sulfite, so that 90g of sulfite should be measured accurately (within 1 gram).

Mark Overton

albada said:

I think the big question is: What pH does E-76 operate at? If it's near 8.3, then I doubt folks could tell any difference between PC-Sulfite and E-76. 90 vs 100g of sulfite won't matter, and 0.15 vs 0.2g of phenidone means a shorter dev-time for E-76, with unknown boost of grain.

BTW, the pH of PC-Sulfite is sensitive to the amount of sodium sulfite, so that 90g of sulfite should be measured accurately (within 1 gram).

Mark Overton

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Try to mix PC-sulfite with sodium ascorbate instead of ascorbic acid. Multply the amount of ascorbic acid with 1.25 to get about the same amount of ascorbate in the solution.
In that way you won't have to balance sulfite - ascorbic acid.

Tronds said:

Try to mix PC-sulfite with sodium ascorbate instead of ascorbic acid. Multply the amount of ascorbic acid with 1.25 to get about the same amount of ascorbate in the solution.
In that way you won't have to balance sulfite - ascorbic acid.

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This is a good idea, but it has one problem: The pH of the developer would be too high. The pH of sulfite is about 9.7, and without the ascorbic acid in there to reduce pH, the pH would stay around 9.7 (assuming ascorbate is neutral). That would make the developer too active, so negatives would be too dense, with high fog and grain. You need some kind of acid in the solution to reduce pH from 9.7 down to 8.2 or 8.3.

Mark Overton

Quick note: I posted an article about PC-Sulfite to the ascorbate-developers blog. You can see it here:
http://ascorbate-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/pc-sulfite-simple-developer-giving-xtol.html

There are many other interesting articles in that blog, and I've learned a good deal from them over the past several months.

Mark Overton

This PC-Sulfite formula is so simple that somebody had to have already thought of it. Well, that somebody turns out to be Peter Svensson who posted a similar formula in 2006 (there was a url link here which no longer exists) in (there was a url link here which no longer exists). Here's his one liter formula:

For comparison, I've quoted my formula below:

albada said:

Sodium sulfite ................ 90 g
Phenidone ..................... 0.15 g
Ascorbic acid ................. 2.8 g

Target pH = 8.2 (same as XTOL). Add 15% to XTOL's time as a starting-point.

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Given that Peter's formula has less alkali and more acid than PC-Sulfite, plus less phenidone, you should expect his formula to have a lower pH with considerably longer dev-times, and perhaps finer grain as well. Anyway, I just stumbled across his formula and wanted to give credit where credit is due.

Mark Overton