PC-TEA with Sodium Sulfite

PC-TEA for film creates razor sharp grains with no solvent effect that can create mackie lines or smooth tonality. It is good but for enlarging or pushing it is a bit harsh at times. I have had great success pushing TRI-X in Xtol to 1600 and enlarging a 6x6 neg to a 16x20 print. I tried adding 60g of Sodium Sulfite to the mix and saw very limited change in the results as far as grain appearance. I am assuming that the standard PC-TEA dilution with 60g of sulfite is like Xtol at 1:1.

I am thinking of trying this mixture with 100g of sulfite instead of 60g. Will that impede the developer from working properly? I hope to see greater solvent action added to the process only. To make the pushed TRI-X grain look like it would if developed in Xtol.

Would I be better off making the PC-TEA twice as strong and adding extra sulfite to simulate xtol at stock strength?

I thought it would be good to have a little more insight before I run some tests, but I will run some tests and look forward to results - thanks

Sulfite below 70g/L had no detectable effect with the 1:100 dilution in my tests:
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)
IDK if a higher concentration of sulfite might work.

In my tests, PC- or MC-TEA yields finer grain, and equally importantly, higher speed with added sulfite. But the pH of the developer seems to be more important than the amount of sulfite, as noted in the Film Developing Cookbook If you add sulfite to PC-TEA, you may be raising the pH enough that it will counteract the solvent effect.

In my latest test, I added about 60g/l of sulfite and a few grams of boric acid to MC-TEA to get a pH just above 8. That gave exceedingly fine grain, but low speed, on Delta 400. I think I've tried that combination PC and Tri-X, with unpleasant disastrous results - the film loses its sharpness. Delta 400 is much better at maintaining its accutance in a highly solvent developer.

fhovie said:

I am assuming that the standard PC-TEA dilution with 60g of sulfite is like Xtol at 1:1.

Click to expand...

Actually, I was interested in this very question a while ago and so I did some math based on the formula for MYTOL, which is supposed to be a fairly close clone of XTOL. The conclusion was that PC-TEA at its working strength is similar in dev-agent concentration to XTOL 1+3, but has a much higher pH than XTOL at this dilution. These two effects cancel one another out and make the dev times similar.

At one point I had an article in the Recipes section of this site describing ways to use PC-Glycol and PC-TEA stock solutions to make more "XTOL-like" working solutions by the addition of sodium sulfite. I called these variants "PC-Gly-TOL" and "PC-TEA-TOL". I used something like 75 ml of PC-Glycol stock plus a bunch of sodium sulfite in each litre of water to get to a developer that actually did work much like XTOL (matched it in sulfite and phenidone concentration and in pH). Some of my favourite images from 2006 were developed in "PC-Gly-TOL".

To adulterate a PC-TEA stock solution in a similar way, I would add 75 ml of the stock solution and about 31 g of sodium metabisulfite per litre of water -- this also gave good results but is not as close a match to XTOL because of the alkalinity of TEA. The dev times are similar, though, so you may want to try diluting 38 ml PC-TEA stock and 15 g sodium metabisulfite in 1 L of water (use XTOL 1+1 times).

The "PC-Gly-TOL" and "PC-TEA-TOL" formulas were here on APUG a while ago, but seem not to have survived the re-build of the Recipes section. I've since dropped them in favour of "Instant MYTOL", which accomplishes roughly the same thing.

Some links that might be of interest:

• Some phenidone-ascorbate developers (from my website)
• The rationale for balancing pH, etc. in Instant MYTOL to match XTOL (also from my website)
• (there was a url link here which no longer exists) (with discussion)

Hope this helps.