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The color of metol

sterioma

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Joined
Jan 9, 2004
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520
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United Kingdom
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Hi,

this is the first time that I play mixing a developer from raw chemicals. I bought a 50g container of metol (produced by Bellini) from an online shop in UK and the colour is a grey-ish brown. I had seen a few videos online of people mixing up D23 and the colour of metol seemed white (like sugar).

I have now made a 500ml batch of D23 (which has a pale grey tint) to test it in a few hours after it cools down, but I am curious if this is expected or a sign that this metol could be subpar, or even gone bad?
 
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I have some from the early 1990's that still works perfectly.....try it and see for yourself!!!
 
Thanks for your feedback.

I guess my surprise comes from seeing this color from an unopened container which is just coming from a shop.
 
Mine is dark brown and it works pretty well.

As I ran out of hydroquinone earlier this year I made some H-76 (that is D-76 with just metol as a developing agent) and I got some very decent negs.
They were a probably a tad soft compared to what I would have gotten with a developer containing both metol and hydroquinone but I'm not complaining.
 
Metol oxidizes to a strongly colored product -- so strongly that very little oxidation produces a lot of color. Pure, fresh metol is off-white, barely a cream color -- but if it's got 0.1% oxidized material on the surface of each granule, it'll look like dirt, and still work fine.
 
I've had metol stored at room temp for many years and never seen it turn brown. Although it may work fine it should not be colored when purchased new.
 
Mine is greyish, not pure white for sure I use it for D23 & D76 and never noticed any issue...
 
Mine is light tan and works fine. Has been so since I bought it years ago, but it never caused me problems.
 
This is metol I purchased in 2006 and opened in 2016. Its 15 years old. It still looks almost brand new. In the 25-30 years I've mixed my own I've never seen it turn brown. While I might use discolored metol if I had it laying around, but I would never accept it purchased new that way. I'd return it in a heartbeat.

YMMV. Some people drink milk long past the due date. I can taste it going bad even before then.
 

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Your Metol will probably work just fine, but brand new, recently purchased product should not be brown. Find a different supplier.
 
When Kodak made Elon (metol) and hydroquinone it was white crystalline free flowing material. It was packaged in squat wide mouth plastic containers that made it easy to scoop out of. I have a bottle of each I bought in the early 70's during a D23 craze. This material is slightly discolored.
 
I had a bottle of Glycin that turned to black brown mass. Totally unusable. The material in the picture looks like old, or lousy metol.
 
They still make some of them - just not in the sort of quantities you might want:
https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/tested-laboratory-chemicals

 
mshchem said:
I've seen a person on Ebay selling small quantities out of these big containers. I wonder how old the material that EK is selling, clearly it is very high quality and keeps for decades.
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It is sold mostly to the motion picture lab industry, so it is probably current.
 
Theoretically, you can purify metol by recrystallization in methanol. I'm tempted to try it, but have to order some methanol, so I keep delaying it.
 
I have just completed developing three strips from a 35mm test film (Fomapan 100 bulk rolled into a 24 roll): D-23 1:1 made with the metol above vs Rodinal 1:50 vs HC-110 1:63 (the last two are my usual developers as they keep forever).

The negatives are still drying, but densities seem comparable across all three strips so it seems like my metol is working.
 
Nonetheless I have sent an email to the producer (fellow Italians) to double check that this colour is expected.
 
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