Rollei RHS troubles?

In a previous thread ((there was a url link here which no longer exists)) I mentioned problems developing Rollei Retro 400S in Rollei RHS. According to one of the answers, my 6 minutes (as indicated on the bottle) was a bit short (8m30s should be better), but 1/3 too short should yield something more than barely visible blacks.

So I tried again. Had one roll of Ilford FP4+ left, shot it outside on AE after finishing my roll of Tri-X yesterday and developed both this morning. The Tri-X in D76 (as usual), which came out fine of course. The FP4+ in my Rollei RHS. On the net, I found 3 minutes 1+7 or 4m45s 1+15 and my bottle says 5 minutes 1+7 (all at 20 degrees). Since my previous try with Rollei Retro 400S was seriously underdeveloped and I mainly wanted to test the developer, I used 6 minutes 1+7, which should overdevelop by any source I found. Unfortunately, the whole roll came out blank. The leader (this one was 35mm) is somewhat grey (about zone 4 or 5 on normal negatives), the edge markings are a little bit visible and with some imagination there's maybe something on some of the negatives.

So... based on these facts I suppose there should be something wrong with my Rollei RHS developer. But I developed about 500 films during the last 10 years in various Agfa/Amaloco/Ilford/Kodak chemistry and I never had any kind of problems with them. And since I haven't read anything about non-working Rollei RHS on the web and all this stuff is made in quite large batches, I can't really believe it. :-s

What do you guys and girls think?

How old is your bottle?

Aurelien said:

How old is your bottle?

Click to expand...

I bought it about three weeks ago and first used it for that Rollei Retro 400S film earlier this week. I bought it from a local photographer which is quite known for his black and white specialties, so I suppose/hope it isn't too old. There is no production date on the bottle, but all film and paper I bought from that guy was always very recent.

But maybe it is a bottle from a box that was put somewhere wrong in the stock and rediscovered after some time? At least it can explain problems with a very limited number of bottles.

Any idea about the shelf life of a fully filled and closed black plastic bottle of Rollei RHS? I developed the rest of my films now with my 5 year old bottle of Rodinal, but that one is known to be quite robust...

OK, I went to my photo stuff shop yesterday, the guy gave me a new bottle of Rollei RHS and that one seems to work as it should. Problem solved...