Rollei Retro 400S and Xtol

I did a search and found many threads but none that seemed to specifically mention the times, film speed and agitation chosen for Xtol.

I suspect that it is a combination that few use and those that have do not seem to have mentioned times. However the threads were some time ago so hopefully since then a few more may have tried Xtol and Rollei 400S.

If so information on times etc would be appreciated

Thanks

pentaxuser

Rollei doesn't manufacture any film they only rebrand. If you could determine what this film really is it would help your search.

It's an Agfa aerial photography film, and it's variously attributed as Avipan 200 or Avipan 400.

It's not too hard to track down times for this film in XTOL, Google led me to the massive dev chart which lists some, and to this datasheet too www.foto-riegler.at/pdf/Datenblatt_Rollei_Retro_400s.pdf

I've used quite a few rolls of this stuff and it's a bit of a mixed blessing. In 135 at least it handles beautifully (dead flat, no curl) but it took me ages to find a development regime that worked to tame the contrast.

Good luck!

pdeeh said:

I've used quite a few rolls of this stuff and it's a bit of a mixed blessing. In 135 at least it handles beautifully (dead flat, no curl) but it took me ages to find a development regime that worked to tame the contrast.

Good luck!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I had seen the MDC times for Xtol which I now suspect have been taken from the Rollei link and if the MDC represents an actual user's time for a satisfactory neg then this is good.

I take some hope in that I know of a user's experience with Rodinal and his times are based exactly on the Rollei chart so hopefully it bodes well for the Xtol time

Have you have actually used Xtol with 400S? If not, what was your developer and can you say what regime you used to tame the contrast which is a concern as it does seem contrasty stuff from looking at scans of negs.

Thanks


pentaxuser

I've never used Xtol at all, so can't help you there.

At the suggestion of Robert Vonk (fotohuis) I tried D74/Rollei RHS-DC, and that worked quite nicely, taming both grain and contrast, but I just didn't want to end up carrying on buying a developer for just one film, and the results while good, were not quite what I wanted.

So I tried Rodinal, and my best results have been exposing at EI 200 and then doing a semi-stand development at 1:100 with single gentle agitations at 20, 40 & 60 mins.
I know stand development causes a few curled lips here at APUG, but in this case it worked rather beautifully.

Here is an example - it is a scan of the negative, but I happen to have printed this one as well and the scan is very close to the print.

20130331-1-2 by _loupe, on Flickr

Thanks again. Yes it certainly looks as if Rodinal works well. The inherent contrast seems properly tamed from your scan. In the semi-stand dev routine with 1 agitation at 20,40 and 60 mins do you do any agitation at the start? If so what. I think I have seen that up to a minute of constant gently agitation might be OK but if your regime consists simply of 3 agitations at 20 min intervals with none at the beginning then that looks good

pentaxuser

Sorry to have been incomplete/imprecise:
Chemistry at 20C
2 minute presoak with gentle agitation.
Developer (6ml Rodinal + 600ml water - I know folk use as little as 3.5ml per roll - as indeed I have, and it was successful - but I prefer to err on the side of caution now)
30s initial gentle agitation.
I didn't try to monitor temperature, but did stand the tank in a large volume of 20C water to try and maintain temperature.

I have experienced streaking with stand development (especially in 120) which I presume is bromide drag, hence the addition of a little agitation during the standing period in order to try and avoid that.