Unopened FX-50 - still expired?

[aolsson]

A year and a half ago I bought a box of Paterson FX-50 film developer (the environment friendly one - remember).

Two days back I decided to try it on a few rolls of T-max 100 from a nigh shoot.

The negatives came out very thin but still with some detail distinguishible.

When I developed another roll using my regular developer (HC-110) it turned out to have much more detail.

The question is: Is it common that developers in unopened boxes "go bad" like this one obviously has? Are certain types more likely than others (what about Xtol?) to perish.

 

[Schlapp]

FX50 was notorius for going off . I've tried Xtol too - that went off quickly! Rodinal is fine

 

[FrankB]

Paterson devs do have a reputation as being short lived.

When the darkroom chems were temporarily discontinued a while back I bought in quite a lot of Aculux 2 (my dev of choice (and quite superb!)). Each bottle has a "use by" label which was good for about 18 months. We're now getting fairly close to that, but I processed a load of film a few weeks ago and it turned out fine.

Probably worth trying a low-value test roll first on bottles of dev bought a while ago (well, that's what I'll be doing from now on!).