What's the status of Rodinal?

Paul Sorensen said:

...I am more concerned about the supply since I am not interested in making it myself.

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I started making my own concentrated p-aminophenol developer the first time Agfa jilted me. Since then, I've seen Agfa go out of business again (more than once).

Petzi said:

I'm glad that you are happy with your home brew developer, and I don't mean to discourage skilled people from making their own developer. However, you can't make Rodinal at home. You don't have the equipment and the knowledge.

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Petzi, you don't know what equipment I have and you also don't know what my academic and scientific credentials are.

Actually, I am not trying to make Rodinal at home (or in my lab either, for that matter).

However, I have the both the equipment and the knowledge required to make, and test high quality, repeatable, p-aminophenol developers that produce results which are equal to the results produced by Agfa Rodinal of 2004 vintage.

Tom Hoskinson said:

Petzi, you don't know what equipment I have and you also don't know what my academic and scientific credentials are.

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Beeing another non-native speaker I assume Petzi is talking about "information" rather than "knowledge" and is not trying to question anyones education.

As far as the rumours got through to me, mixing the current Agfa Rodinal involves doing it in large quantities (over 100L per Batch) and doing it under a nitrogen atmosphere from the start right into the bottle.
The current process is with respect to exact times, temperatures and pixie dust largely undisclosed.

Both taken together makes it more than unlikely that anyone on this board even if he has access to a sophistacated scientific lab or a chemical process plant has the means *and* information to make an exact copy of the current Agfa Rodinal.

OTOH This is getting into splitting hairs and I couldn't care less as it's easy to make substitutes which work equally well and may be very close to insdistuingishable for all practical applications though not identical. Not to forget that I stopped using Rodinal some years ago (heresy! ).

best wishes

Stefan

Bruce (Camclicker) said:

Has it made its' way back under a new name or is it gone forever?

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Yes it's back, and is available from Freestyle (where I got mine) and all the usual places. Plus I think J&C carries it as well.

Tom Hoskinson said:

But... is it the REAL Rodinal? Is the Pixie Dust exactly the same?

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Tom, I still have a "vintage" (?) bottle and one of the new ones (slightly different packaging). The results have been the same, as well as having the same dark look to the liquid. So I'd presume it's same as before.

In Europe the full line if Agfa chemistry is back into production. When I go to Germany in a few months, I'm hoping to stock up.

Paul Sorensen said:

That is why I was wondering if they had the rights to the name Agfa. I am sure that Agfa wants to keep control of its name and that A&O would have to have made arrangements to use the name. I guess I was expecting a new label "A&O Rodinal" or something of the like. Do you know if there is any way that one can tell the difference between pre A&O and current Rodinal?

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The packaging is slightly different. Other than that, they are the same thing.

Paul Sorensen said:

I was talking about labeling and packaging, not performance. I would love to know that the new stuff is indeed getting to the US and we can count on our supply being steady.

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You are correct, the packaging & labeling is somewhat different, but still easily recognizable as Rodinal.

I got an e-mail from A&O today. I inquired about their US distributor for b/w chemicals. This is the answer:

Integra Technologies International, Inc.
P.O. Box 2207
TX 78691, Pflugerville 2207 / USA

Tel. 001-512-6573688 oder 001-512-9899996
Fax: 001-512-251-3136

E-Mail: Skaggsr@integrawest.com = Ron Skaggs
peckg@integrawest.com = Gene Peck

(00 is the international prefix in Germany)

I picked up a bottle on ebay a week or so ago...(no, I didn't pay $30.00+10.00 shipping for it..).

I souped some PanF in it and it turned out as expected; good ol Rodinal.

The only thing I noticed was that the concentrate, when poured from the, now translucent not opaque, bottle had a purple-ish tone to it. My one and only prior bottle was browner in color.

I'm not that long into developing, but this stuff is rapidly turning into my "go to" developer...

I just got mine from Freestyle and I can't see that it is from anyone other than Agfa. The US distributor is listed as Agfa Corporation in New Jersey. I wonder if this isn't leftover Agfa stuff like the paper and film that Freestyle is selling.

joeyk49 said:

The only thing I noticed was that the concentrate, when poured from the, now translucent not opaque, bottle had a purple-ish tone to it. My one and only prior bottle was browner in color.

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That is a clear sign that your new bottle was fresh. Agfa Rodinal starts its life with the colour you describe and gets darker with age.

Stefan

skahde said:

That is a clear sign that your new bottle was fresh. Agfa Rodinal starts its life with the colour you describe and gets darker with age.

Stefan

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...Excellent!

Okay, please pardon my ignorance...Why is this stuff so great? I've never tried it. Can someone educate me on what the excitement is about and why I should consider trying it? :confused:

I typically shoot FP4,Tri-X, HP5, Delta 100/400, Neopan 400 and Technical Pan (from 4x5 down to 135) in that order.

In my darkroom, I currently have HC-110, D76, TMAX, Microdol-X, Technidol, Diafine and Acufine. It hardly seems reasonable for me to buy another developer when I have enough to last me the next 3-5 years!

pandino said:

Okay, please pardon my ignorance...Why is this stuff so great? I've never tried it. Can someone educate me on what the excitement is about and why I should consider trying it? :confused:

In my darkroom, I currently have HC-110, D76, TMAX, Microdol-X, Technidol, Diafine and Acufine. It hardly seems reasonable for me to buy another developer when I have enough to last me the next 3-5 years!

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Oh, you've really opened a can of worms here!

One answer to your question is because you can. Another is that all families of devs are unique with their own look. Hc-110 and D-76 are general-purpose, moderately fine-grain devs. Microdol-X is even finer grained. Diafine and Acufine are for increasing the EI and 'Technidol is a low contrast dev for document films. Rodinal is different from all of these. The best answer is for you to try it.

pandino said:

Okay, please pardon my ignorance...Why is this stuff so great? I've never tried it. Can someone educate me on what the excitement is about and why I should consider trying it? :confused:

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You are right to be confused. There is nothing 'wrong' with Rodinal; in fact, it is quite nice. I like it. It is not all that special, IMHO. Nothing to support the ongoing sturm und drang surrounding it.

I typically shoot FP4,Tri-X, HP5, Delta 100/400, Neopan 400 and Technical Pan (from 4x5 down to 135) in that order.

In my darkroom, I currently have HC-110, D76, TMAX, Microdol-X, Technidol, Diafine and Acufine. It hardly seems reasonable for me to buy another developer when I have enough to last me the next 3-5 years!

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Like HC-110, Rodinal is highly concentrated and has a very long shelf-life. It is very economical to use, often diluted to 1+50 or beyond. It has many excellent qualities, which I will leave to the slack-jawed drooling sycophants* to explain in painful and unending detail. They like that.

For some reason, Rodinal has aquired the patina of 'cult status'. It has adherants who must drink the stuff - they will brook no inference that anything, anywhere, could ever be the equal of their mighty juice. They will hold you spellbound (in a not-really-interested kind of way) with tales of historic derring-do as European and American and Russian forces battled it out in WWI and then WWII and how the uber-sekrit recipe of Rodinal was stolen, copied, altered intentionally to cover their tracks, published minus critical sekrit ingrediants and pixie dust, changed to fool the Russians, changed to fool the Allies, and finally tucked into a vault deep in the recesses of Leverhausen, Germany (or Wolfen, depending on the extent of your Rodinal illness) where it remains to this day. It has been altered from time to time by the wizards of Agfa - but when THEY change it, it remains The True Grail. When others change it, well, it is a sad and worthless substitute. I fully suspect that the sequel to the "DaVinci Code" will be "The Rodinal Code."

When Agfa spun off Agfa Foto and then left it to go ker-plooey, the Rodinal aparatchiks went completely nuts. They went all over the net, screaming about the death of Rodinal and oh bloody dear what will they ever do without the precious elixir? They bought out stores, they paid hudreds of dollars for small bottles on eBay, they whined and cried and moaned on every online forum they could find. Despite being told that very similar or identical recipes for Rodinal were available online and were easily made and even available for purchase ready-made, they didn't care. It wasn't AGFA Rodinal, and oh dear, the world had ended.

Then the rumors about Agfa being purchased and Rodinal being revived started up. One small rumor was all it took, and the madness began again. Lots of people, apparently completely unable to look such information up for themselves or to pick up the phone and call or even just email for details were repeating rumors back and forth to each other, elaborating on each one and assurring each other that they were correct - with total disregard for reality.

Eventually, a&o bought Agfa's chemical line and decided to continue producing Rodinal, among other Agfa chemicals. I found this out because I, you know, EMAILED a&o and asked them, then posted the response. Duh. That was hard.

And for months afterwards, late-comers to the party would start new crying threads stating "Did you hear? Rodinal is gone! What will we DOOOOOOOO????"

Now that a&o is shipping Rodinal again, I have no doubt that there will be True Believers who will take one sniff and decide that this Rodinal is not real Rodinal, and we're off to the races again.

Frankly, I bought Rodinal to see what all the furor was about. I like it. It's nice. I also like Diafine and D-76. HC-110, not so much. But hey, it's not magic juice. It is just a good developer. I can understand enthusiasm - it is the Rodinal Army(tm) I find a trifle frightening.

*And no, I did not call anyone a rat-faced ferret in this post. Unless you are a rat-faced ferret, in which case, if the shoe fits...

Wigwam Jones said:

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Well said! ;-)

Gerald Koch said:

Well said! ;-)

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Thank you. I give good rant.

jim appleyard said:

One answer to your question is because you can. Another is that all families of devs are unique with their own look. Hc-110 and D-76 are general-purpose, moderately fine-grain devs. Microdol-X is even finer grained. Diafine and Acufine are for increasing the EI and 'Technidol is a low contrast dev for document films. Rodinal is different from all of these. The best answer is for you to try it.

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To elaborate a bit: Developers can be roughly categorized as having varying degrees of capability in three areas: Grain reduction, speed enhancement, and acutance improvement. (Acutance is, roughly speaking, perceived sharpness.) Typically, you can get very good capabilities in one or two of these areas, but not in all three of them simultaneously. Also, by "good capabilities" I mean an ability to enhance in the implied direction: reduced grain, increased speed, or increased acutance. You might not want one or more of those specific characteristics, in which case "good" becomes "bad." Moral relativism for photography. Of course, developers have other features than these three, too, but this will do for a start.

In any event, Rodinal is very much in the acutance-enhancing category, at the expense of grain reduction and film speed. It's also got its own unique "look" in other ways, which I won't attempt to describe. It's most often recommended for slow- to medium-speed films (no more than ISO 200), but some people like it even for faster films.

As a practical matter, Rodinal is also legendary because of its longevity -- half-used bottles can last for years. It's a liquid concentrate, which some people prefer over powders. Rodinal's not unique in either of these characteristics (HC-110 comes to mind as having similar characteristics), but if you want these specific features, the field is fairly narrow. Rodinal has extraordinary longevity in another sense, too: It was patented in 1891, and although the formula's been "tweaked" over the years (Wigwam Jones gives some hint of that in his amusing reply), today's Rodinal is presumably very similar in action to the stuff that was available over a century ago.

On a chemistry/trivia note, Rodinal is one of the few commercial developers (the only one I'm aware of, in fact, at least if you class R09 and similar Rodinal variants as Rodinal) that uses para-aminophenol (aka p-aminophenol) as its developing agent. P-aminophenol is chemically related to metol, which is much more common, but the two aren't identical or interchangeable. No doubt this is part of the reason for some of Rodinal's characteristics, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to say precisely how.

You might want to peruse Ryuji Suzuki's page on his DS-10 and DS-12 developers for a brief discussion of matching film to developer and Ed Buffaloe's page on Rodinal for some general information on its characteristics.

As to whether or not you should try Rodinal, if you've got plenty of stock of current developers, I wouldn't recommend doing so in the short term unless you hear something about Rodinal that strongly appeals to you and that you believe none of your current developers can do. You (that is, pandino) have already got a wide selection of developers available, and switching developers for every roll of film will just be a lot of hassle. In the long term, Rodinal is a perfectly capable developer, and when your stocks of developers run low, you might consider buying a small bottle just to see for yourself what all the fuss is about. Of course, the same can be said of just about any developer; you'll have to prioritize based on your needs and preferences, and only you know those. Personally, I think a sensible approach for a hobbyist photographer is to have a couple of regularly-used developers for different films or effects, and perhaps one or two others with which you're experimenting at any given time. That way, you'll be able to get predictable results from your regular developers on important rolls but still be able to experiment with other rolls to satisfy your curiosity and see if something else might be an improvement. If you like what you see with one of the new ones, you can upgrade it to "regularly-used" status, perhaps retiring one of the ones that's already in that category.

srs5694 said:

In any event, Rodinal is very much in the acutance-enhancing category, at the expense of grain reduction and film speed.

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While Rodinal could be said to be an acutance developer it is not a very good one. The edge effects that it produces are poor compared to other true acutance developers like Beutler or Kodak HDD.

Thanks for the thoughtful (and at times verbose!) replies. I really appreciate the civility of this site. I got started on HC-110 because of it's low cost and long life. I typically use it as a single shot for consistency. It clearly isn't ideal for everything, so maybe I'll give Rodinal a try at some point.

Where to purchase

Just spoke to A&O. I called Miss Verhoeben +4921315236163 and got forwarded to Miss Schuhmacher. She can also ship Rodinal to the end user, but smallest packaging units are 6x500ml or 10x150ml.

Gerald Koch said:

While Rodinal could be said to be an acutance developer it is not a very good one. The edge effects that it produces are poor compared to other true acutance developers like Beutler or Kodak HDD.

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It has good sized grain, nice tonailty, and full speed if you dev anythiing in it for 2.5h in 1:200. Just make shure to ALWAYS dev as this. i had a roll that i shot at 100(Tmax400)and i developed it for 1.5h, meaning to pull it, and the negs came out thin

Markok765 said:

It has good sized grain, nice tonailty, and full speed if you dev anythiing in it for 2.5h in 1:200. ...

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On the other hand, half strength FX-2 for 90 minutes (agitate first minute, then after 30 minute) gives a full stop better speed, tighter grain structure, and no risk of "bromide drag".

I use Rodinal myself, but only for LF in drums: Continuous agitation in Rodinal 1:25.

Ole said:

On the other hand, half strength FX-2 for 90 minutes (agitate first minute, then after 30 minute) gives a full stop better speed, tighter grain structure, and no risk of "bromide drag".

I use Rodinal myself, but only for LF in drums: Continuous agitation in Rodinal 1:25.

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Whats "Bromide Drag?

For me, a bottle of rodinal lasts 200 films, excluding evaporation and in 35mm size