Photographers Formulary BW-2

[CJBo001]

Does anyone have experience (good or bad) with Photographers Formulary BW-2 T-MAX developer? I am interested in optimizing grain and sharpness and don't want to deal with 5 liters of XTOL as I won't be processing a lot of film. Any other suggestions welcome.
Thanks in advance. - Chuck

 

[nworth]

I tried it a few years ago at a workshop, and I got quite beautiful negatives. I've had no experience with it since, but it seems to be a quite good developer. Developers can be a pretty personal thing. Whenever you wonder about something like this, you should try the product on 3 or 4 not too important rolls, then make your own decision.

 

[mopar_guy]

This developer is a great choice. Simple to mix liquid and gives beautiful results. I first used this over 20 years ago. It comes in a small kit for low volume users.

 

[seadrive]

I needed to order some more BW-65 anyway, so I ordered some BW-2 to try with the T-grain films I've been testing, especially TMY and Acros. I'll let you know what I think of it.

 

[seadrive]

Finally received my BW-2 from B&H today, so I used it to develop a test roll of TMY-2, rated at 400.

At the recommended development time of 7 minutes at 68F, I'd say my negs are 30-40% overdeveloped. I usually start out with 20% less than the recommended time, but since the instructions were written by someone at Formulary, not Kodak, I thought, hey, maybe they know what they're talking about <sigh>.

This is not a one-shot developer. You mix up a liter of the working solution, and use it to process up to 10 rolls. Each roll gets 10% more development time than the one before it.

So... let's say that the dev time for the first roll should have been 5 minutes. That means that the second roll would get 5:30. But that assumes that the 10% increase from roll-to-roll is accurate, which I have no way of knowing until I nail down the initial time, so... <sigh>

This is gonna be a PITA, but I'll see what I can do.