Distilled water is sans minerals or for practical purposes mineral free.
The minerals in tap water will cause friction which slows down the ability of chemicals reaching film. Gordon Hutchings book on Pyro describes the benifits of using distilled water for this reason and other benifits.
I have done grey background tests for the problems Sanders seem to be expressing and distilled water will get the chems to the emulsion much faster than that of tap water in any large city.
What I did not express fully in my first post is in Aurleans images you will see that the band of minus density is not a consistant black line but splotchy which IMO is due to inconsistant development in the initial stage of development which on grey backgrounds are killers.
If you process 35mm roll this problem is even worse due to the sprocket holes. Even with colour film we take the film off the processor and do a manual twist as I described and we use distilled water for C41 process as well and not mineral loaded tap water.
After processing 30-50 thousand rolls of film in colour and black and white with my film company I have noticed this to be a common problem no matter what method is used to process film.
This flow of chemicals onto the film*laminar flow* *and I may be using the wrong term* is probably the most critical part of processing.
In my first years of processing for others , I purchased 40 35mm stainless steel reels *kinderman I believe* that did not have a open core but a closed one. I found on the third or fourth frame I cannot remember which one, a minus density mark that was extremely faint but there. Complex images were not a problem but anything with nuetral like some skys would show the mark. I immediately returned the reels and swithched to open core reels and the problem dissapeared. I attribute this to the flow action of the developer in the initial stages of development .
If the truth were known this minus density problem is much more prevelent in negatives but our eyes are fooled by complex images or just not printing the negative dark enough.
Shoot a 18% grey card and do your normal process or have your lab process the film and then put the negative in your enlarger*assuming it is even* and print the grey down and look for faults.I think most photographers would be shocked with the results.
It is really hard to get an even tone corner to corner.
The common point here is the plain mid grey background, presumably because it does show the problem to maximum effect. But one question Bob. How on earth does distilled water promote "laminar flow"?