Photographers Formulary Print Developer...like Amidol???

[User Removed]

A friend just gave me several gallons of concentrate Photographers Formulary Print Developer. On the bottles it says it is compairable to Amidol.

Well, How so?

Can you use a water bath?
Does it get as good as blacks as Amidol?
Same image tone?
Anyone tried it with AZO?

Im going to test it out this weekend, but I just wanted to know what to somewhat expect before wasting sometime.

Thanks.

 

[Donald Miller]

Not having used the developer that you have makes it difficult to comment. I will go on to say that there are several Amidol formulations. As a global statement, it is widely recognized that Amidol is the most active of developing agents.

I guess that as in most things, this depends on what you are wanting and what your quality standards are. It is a personal judgement.

 

[lee]

Donald has formulated a very nice print developer and the formula can be found at unblinkingeye.com it is called PPPD. It is very comparible to Amidol with Azo.

lee\c

 

[doughowk]

I've used their BW-65 on AZO & Kentmere Bromide with good results. A friend uses Amidol on his AZO but he also uses Ansco 130 with good results too. Maybe there is a benefit to using Amidol; but, at my level of photography, I don't perceive the difference.

 

[nworth]

Someone actually published the formula for BW65 a while back. It's not even vaguely related to amidol. It's supposedly based on Agfa 130, but it has phenidone and glycin in it, so it's not closely related to 130. It does work well; I've used it for a couple of years. It's a bit softer than Dektol (like 130), but gives an excellent range of tones. The big advantage is the two solution formulation. The developing agents are kept slightly acid, and the solutions last almost forever.

 

[Wayne]

I've never seen an actual formula for BW-65-are you maybe thinking of my posts comparing it to a phenidone version of Ansco 130 (which is what I believe BW 65 is very similar to). The disadvantage of BW 65 is it expires rapidly once mixed. I've never used amidol so i cant compare it's results with that.

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

There are developers that can produce a similar tonal scale to amidol developers, but they usually can't do water bath the way that amidol can.

 

[Gerald Koch]

A friend just gave me several gallons of concentrate Photographers Formulary Print Developer. On the bottles it says it is compairable to Amidol.

Ah! but it doesn't say that it IS Amidol. I suspect that they are claiming that it produces blacks similar to Amidol.