Ian, thank you for the link. I'm looking forward to trying the 'ADOX PAN PROFESSIONAL 100' film.
Tom
Tom
Windisch Surface Developer _ what's correct
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What should, and what can, go into a Formulary?
I'd like to discuss this message of Sandy's because it represents exactly what I thought when I set out to write FDC. I wanted to do characteristic curves, sed testing, MTFs, granularity, acutance, you name it --- for every developer I thought worthy of discussion. To that end, I solicited help from every source I could think of. The only person who actually did help me was Bob Watson, of EG&G, who had developed the prototype super-accurate curved-platen sensitometer which was more accurate even than the ones everyone I knew at Kodak customarily used (those were flat-platen models which didn't compensate for light falloff at the edges of the sample). He sold me his exquisite engineering prototype for $200. I used it for a couple of years, but it was clear to me that I would never be able to do the work for a hundred or so developers. Bud Wilson seemed to have someone who was interested in this kind of work, so I sent the sensitometer to him. The guy left by the time it got there, and the sensitometer eventually perished in a fire. By then Bob had died tragically young, so that was the end of senstometers and me.
Nobody who then had a microdensitometer would do any work for me or let me have access to one, and the nasty fellow at RIT, Dr. Francis, who was in charge of theirs, told me I was a total fool if I ever tried to use one, because they were completely inconsistent and would drive me crazy. (He died, too.) Much later I learned from Zawadzki and Dickerson that they had designed an automated machine, which cost Kodak something like a million, which did it all for you at the press of a button -- well, almost. But even they couldn't get access to their equipment anymore! (Richard Henry had one, but I didn't entirely trust his results. In any case, he died too. There's a curse on microdensitometers.)
The fact is, Sandy, you have to make a choice. Either you write the book, or you spend 20 years testing, or trying to. You can't do both. Unless you have a backer willing to spend millions!
For FDC, I largely did not discuss developers that I or Steve had not actually used at some point. But our knowledge of many of them was not always in great depth. We might have used some of them only a few times - - maybe only once. And we certainly had not conducted what I would call objective tests. For me, objective tests would encompass everything that Kodak could do with granularity and MTF, plus standardized real-life photographs, to the extent that you can ever repeat a standardized photograph, or find a repeatable standard scene that is worth photographing or will really tell you anything you really want to know about the developer.
In the real world, this is simply out of the question, and would be totally out of the question for any formulary that Ron or I or anyone else would do. As this thread illustrates, there are significant, and extremely time-consuming problems, in establishing what is the correct formula even for one of Kodak's most famous developers. I published what I am still convinced, since I had it from Russell, is the best formula, but Ian has convinced methat I should have said much more about it and given variants.
So no, Sandy, what you are suggesting is not something I could plan on, though it is something I could still dream about. Just think about the difficulties of doing image quality evaluation of a film/developer combination. At what speed do you do it? At what speed does the film best perform with that developer? By what standards do you define performing best? Highest sharpness? Finest grain? Those may be contradictory goals . . . . .
One of the most helpful things anyone said to me about writing a book was when I was cross-examining Bob Schwalberg about something he had said about phenidone. 'Anything anybody ever writes about photochemistry represents only the tip of the iceberg.' It was a long time before I accepted this.
What I think we could do is ONLY this: get as many historical formulas as possible in as accurate condition as possible. Then we could talk about them from either one of two viewpoints. If we have experience of the developer, we could say what it was. If we don't have experience, we could give an educated guess as to what the developer might do with modern materials and what might be a starting point. My view is that a good guess from Ron and me is better than nothing - - or reprinting some very general instructions from 50 or 60 years ago.
Does anyone think that would be useful, assuming that we would print virtually every formula we could get ahold of? What about you, Sandy, in particular?
I'd like to discuss this message of Sandy's because it represents exactly what I thought when I set out to write FDC. I wanted to do characteristic curves, sed testing, MTFs, granularity, acutance, you name it --- for every developer I thought worthy of discussion. To that end, I solicited help from every source I could think of. The only person who actually did help me was Bob Watson, of EG&G, who had developed the prototype super-accurate curved-platen sensitometer which was more accurate even than the ones everyone I knew at Kodak customarily used (those were flat-platen models which didn't compensate for light falloff at the edges of the sample). He sold me his exquisite engineering prototype for $200. I used it for a couple of years, but it was clear to me that I would never be able to do the work for a hundred or so developers. Bud Wilson seemed to have someone who was interested in this kind of work, so I sent the sensitometer to him. The guy left by the time it got there, and the sensitometer eventually perished in a fire. By then Bob had died tragically young, so that was the end of senstometers and me.
Nobody who then had a microdensitometer would do any work for me or let me have access to one, and the nasty fellow at RIT, Dr. Francis, who was in charge of theirs, told me I was a total fool if I ever tried to use one, because they were completely inconsistent and would drive me crazy. (He died, too.) Much later I learned from Zawadzki and Dickerson that they had designed an automated machine, which cost Kodak something like a million, which did it all for you at the press of a button -- well, almost. But even they couldn't get access to their equipment anymore! (Richard Henry had one, but I didn't entirely trust his results. In any case, he died too. There's a curse on microdensitometers.)
The fact is, Sandy, you have to make a choice. Either you write the book, or you spend 20 years testing, or trying to. You can't do both. Unless you have a backer willing to spend millions!
For FDC, I largely did not discuss developers that I or Steve had not actually used at some point. But our knowledge of many of them was not always in great depth. We might have used some of them only a few times - - maybe only once. And we certainly had not conducted what I would call objective tests. For me, objective tests would encompass everything that Kodak could do with granularity and MTF, plus standardized real-life photographs, to the extent that you can ever repeat a standardized photograph, or find a repeatable standard scene that is worth photographing or will really tell you anything you really want to know about the developer.
In the real world, this is simply out of the question, and would be totally out of the question for any formulary that Ron or I or anyone else would do. As this thread illustrates, there are significant, and extremely time-consuming problems, in establishing what is the correct formula even for one of Kodak's most famous developers. I published what I am still convinced, since I had it from Russell, is the best formula, but Ian has convinced methat I should have said much more about it and given variants.
So no, Sandy, what you are suggesting is not something I could plan on, though it is something I could still dream about. Just think about the difficulties of doing image quality evaluation of a film/developer combination. At what speed do you do it? At what speed does the film best perform with that developer? By what standards do you define performing best? Highest sharpness? Finest grain? Those may be contradictory goals . . . . .
One of the most helpful things anyone said to me about writing a book was when I was cross-examining Bob Schwalberg about something he had said about phenidone. 'Anything anybody ever writes about photochemistry represents only the tip of the iceberg.' It was a long time before I accepted this.
What I think we could do is ONLY this: get as many historical formulas as possible in as accurate condition as possible. Then we could talk about them from either one of two viewpoints. If we have experience of the developer, we could say what it was. If we don't have experience, we could give an educated guess as to what the developer might do with modern materials and what might be a starting point. My view is that a good guess from Ron and me is better than nothing - - or reprinting some very general instructions from 50 or 60 years ago.
Does anyone think that would be useful, assuming that we would print virtually every formula we could get ahold of? What about you, Sandy, in particular?
I believe that such a formulary would be interesting, certainly from a historical perspective, but if there is no information included as to how the formula might work with contemporary films I probably would not find it useful for my own work.
It would clearly not be possible to provide information about MTFs, acutance, granularity, etc. but it might be possible to run a family of 3-5 curves with every developer with one standard film to produce a CI/Time chart, say FP4+, and folks could then interpolate development time for other film types. Late model densitometers would allow you to read density readings directly into a plotting program.
Just a thought -- perhaps not feasible.
Sandy King
OP
OP
One problem with "Opinionated guesses" is that they are sometimes quite wrong, so a developer that you or Ron may say probably won't work as originally formulated with modern materials may behave quite differently in practice.
The DCB 3rd Ed. approach is far better where people with experience (ie Sandy King) write about certain types of developers. One thing is for sure neither you or Ron (or anyone else) would have sufficiently broad experience to write authoritatively about every type of film developer unless you'd tested them, some excellent formulae (or similar) were never used by Kodak, others never sold or imported into the US in a commercial form, and these are the developers currently overlooked by the FDC, which as Bill has said he's aware are neglected.
There are people out there with plenty of experience using developers not really covered by the Ist Edition of the FDC and their knowledge needs to be tapped into and incorporated.
I make this point because I know some APUG members felt that the FDC was dismissive of certain PPD developers, in this case it was clarity of opinion and a lack of practical experience that made the section difficult to interpret. This is one area where a huge amount of work has been done, many commercial products produced and is an area neglected in more recent years, but there are people with experience.
Ian
The DCB 3rd Ed. approach is far better where people with experience (ie Sandy King) write about certain types of developers. One thing is for sure neither you or Ron (or anyone else) would have sufficiently broad experience to write authoritatively about every type of film developer unless you'd tested them, some excellent formulae (or similar) were never used by Kodak, others never sold or imported into the US in a commercial form, and these are the developers currently overlooked by the FDC, which as Bill has said he's aware are neglected.
There are people out there with plenty of experience using developers not really covered by the Ist Edition of the FDC and their knowledge needs to be tapped into and incorporated.
I make this point because I know some APUG members felt that the FDC was dismissive of certain PPD developers, in this case it was clarity of opinion and a lack of practical experience that made the section difficult to interpret. This is one area where a huge amount of work has been done, many commercial products produced and is an area neglected in more recent years, but there are people with experience.
Ian
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I hate to bring this up again, but perusing these old formulas I find an astounding error rate in transcription. I have as many as 6 formulas for some developers (including the Metric and English (US) versions). In one formula it says to start with 32 oz of water (500 ml) and dilute to 16 oz, but this is a 1 L formula from appearances. Now the error here is obvious in the English version, but the use of a quart vs a liter also introduces, across the board, many questions again about conversion.
So, making such a formulary would have to revolve around discovering errors and by guesswork correcting them. I might really be able to get some of the equipment made available to me for testing, but I am only one person with limited time and I doubt if any such monumental work would come to fruition in my lifetime no matter how much I wish it. The preface to the lab work, correcting formulas or gathering correct formulas would take years all on its own.
OTOH, it is a challenge and I would love to do it.
PE
So, making such a formulary would have to revolve around discovering errors and by guesswork correcting them. I might really be able to get some of the equipment made available to me for testing, but I am only one person with limited time and I doubt if any such monumental work would come to fruition in my lifetime no matter how much I wish it. The preface to the lab work, correcting formulas or gathering correct formulas would take years all on its own.
OTOH, it is a challenge and I would love to do it.
PE
Ian,
I realise my question is not central to this discussion, but how many of these developers could be put to useful ends today, when we have developers such as XTOL, Pyrocat-HD, HC-110 available?
Tom
I realise my question is not central to this discussion, but how many of these developers could be put to useful ends today, when we have developers such as XTOL, Pyrocat-HD, HC-110 available?
Tom
OP
OP
Tom, you've grasped the reality, very few, but there are some excellent neglected formulae that are worth looking at and perhaps taking further.
Sandy King's Pyrocat is very closely related to much older formulae and so is Xtol and maybe it's a case of looking at other other avenues, these niches were filled in the past by small companies who manufactured excellent & innovative developers now long lost although some formulae exist. Johnson's Meritol a PPD/Pyrocatechin dev agant was used in a variety of superb developers, Edwall is another company whose range was once far larger, now only a few formulae are still made by a US based company, others are Phenidone/Glycin based, etc.
Ian
Sandy King's Pyrocat is very closely related to much older formulae and so is Xtol and maybe it's a case of looking at other other avenues, these niches were filled in the past by small companies who manufactured excellent & innovative developers now long lost although some formulae exist. Johnson's Meritol a PPD/Pyrocatechin dev agant was used in a variety of superb developers, Edwall is another company whose range was once far larger, now only a few formulae are still made by a US based company, others are Phenidone/Glycin based, etc.
Ian
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Bear in mind that in Canada thankfully paper sizes have never been converted to metric because the A size LH won't fit the filing cabinets and the Americans only buy inches. Your copy paper is still 8.5 x 11 and hopefully always will be. Even German printing presses are mostly 29 inch
Mark
Go here for an actual formula as written within EK.
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)
PE
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)
PE
Are you refering to the post by Pat with the Hardy and Perrin formula, or is your link pointing to the wrong place?
It takes me to my post #106 with a real Kodak formula accurate to whatever decimal we used for a given ingredient and indicating that published formulae are rounded already.
PE
Fascinating... It takes me to Page 9 of that thread, posts #160 on. Maybe there's a bug in the system.
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The link works for me, but I question the wisdom of using a formula which does not work properly with even the slightest variation. I think a good developer should be reasonably robust with respect to variations in the composition.
My point was that all formulas were prepared internally to the optimum point for functionality. They were then probably rounded for publication to make it "reasonably robust" as you put it, but it would then differ from the exact formula.
I'm beginning to suspect this is why many think that D-72 does not equal Dektol. D-72 may be a rounded form of Dektol that works well enough for the average user and is easier to mix.
PE
Did Kodak use metric then?
One might think you would have started in something other than metric...
and then converted, but the Rx above is already there.
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OP
OP
Ray;
It was all metric as far back as I ever saw internal formulas. This includes emulsion formulas, process formulas and plant formulas.
I saw reports as far back as the 40s, some as old verifax copies.
PE
One thing that come to my mind is:
What are the odds that the optimum amount of any component of any formula will have "round" quantitities. We can see in PE's example of a Kodak formula in the Teaspoon thread, there are some components that are numbers that certainly have not been rounded to less precision - see the Antical, NaBr, Benzyl Alcohol, CD-3, and boric acid below:
When I see values like that, it appears to me that some optimization of the amounts of constituents has been performed. Start calculating ratios of components, and you do not get simple fractions as a result.
If everything is rounded to whole numbers, say like in
510-Pyro:
or even Pyrocat-HD:
where the weights are whole gram weights, I wonder if there could have been a bit more optimization? Would 9.9 or 10.45 grams of Pyrogallol in 510-Pyro have given "better" results when combined with the 5 grams ascorbic acid, or maybe 51.5 grams of Pyrocatechol might have given "better" results with the 2.0 grams of Phenidone in the Pyrocat-HD? The ratios of some of these components make nice, whole fractions, and I wonder what are the odd of that? (Taking into account that these components will have molecular weights that are not even multiples of the other components usually - that is, perhaps the molar fractions to be multiples for some things, but not gram weights...)
I can't tell without doing a lot of tests myself, and I may not even have suitable tools to do truely optimize a formula myself.
Certainly these formulas do "work", but I wonder about these things sometime...
What are the odds that the optimum amount of any component of any formula will have "round" quantitities. We can see in PE's example of a Kodak formula in the Teaspoon thread, there are some components that are numbers that certainly have not been rounded to less precision - see the Antical, NaBr, Benzyl Alcohol, CD-3, and boric acid below:
When I see values like that, it appears to me that some optimization of the amounts of constituents has been performed. Start calculating ratios of components, and you do not get simple fractions as a result.
If everything is rounded to whole numbers, say like in
510-Pyro:
or even Pyrocat-HD:
where the weights are whole gram weights, I wonder if there could have been a bit more optimization? Would 9.9 or 10.45 grams of Pyrogallol in 510-Pyro have given "better" results when combined with the 5 grams ascorbic acid, or maybe 51.5 grams of Pyrocatechol might have given "better" results with the 2.0 grams of Phenidone in the Pyrocat-HD? The ratios of some of these components make nice, whole fractions, and I wonder what are the odd of that? (Taking into account that these components will have molecular weights that are not even multiples of the other components usually - that is, perhaps the molar fractions to be multiples for some things, but not gram weights...)
I can't tell without doing a lot of tests myself, and I may not even have suitable tools to do truely optimize a formula myself.
Certainly these formulas do "work", but I wonder about these things sometime...
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Very Interesting.
Just to be clear/sure, are you saying that as far as you know... back to the dates you gave, most if not all of the internal (and therefore producton formulas) were actually created in metric, and only converted later... for the metric-shy consumer?
Kirk,
If I paid attention long enough,
I think the answer to your 1st Q is "pretty good"!
I have seen both types of behaviour, and there are both fuzzy optimums and sharp optimums in my experience.
I suspect there are more of the fuzzy ones, but of course spliting hairs is... or , rather testing is very taxing.
Ray
All formulas that I had contact with were metric! I cannot make it more clear. I never used an English measure in the entire time I spent at EK, nor did I see anyone else use it!
As for the formula, I can assure you that the amounts of NaBr and NaCl are absolutely critical and cause a significant effect if there is any deviation in level. Rounded formulas are not common!
I would like to add that in one formula the difference between 4.0 g/l, and 4.2 g/l of one ingredient was quite considerable.
PE
As for the formula, I can assure you that the amounts of NaBr and NaCl are absolutely critical and cause a significant effect if there is any deviation in level. Rounded formulas are not common!
I would like to add that in one formula the difference between 4.0 g/l, and 4.2 g/l of one ingredient was quite considerable.
PE
I am not addressng the issue of rounding at all...
I am just curious that Kodak formulated in metric so long ago,
yet continued to sell in Gallons and ounces etc.
I have already addressed the fuzzy vs. sharp optimums in a prevous post.
Ray
OP
OP
There's a second issue implicit in the above statement, because the US didn't use the English Avoirdupois system, but their own short measure form.
And then while the laboratories used Metric (after all they were run by Europeans) the packaging plants would have been receiving chemicals in avoirdupois packaging, and in the US market Kodak still sell some chemistry in Avoirdupois packaging, so Kodak most certainly used both systems, the last vestiges are seen even today.
Ian
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