Xtol dilution for Paper Dev.

Good day and seasons greetings.

I have a box of MGIV postcard stock which I am using for holiday greeting cards. My only developers in house are Xtol and D76. I have used XTOL as a paper developer before but am clueless about dilution. Could someone offer up a suggestion?

As an extra bonus question what are grades 0 and 4 for MGIV on a colour head? I know I could find all this up on Ilford and Kodak's sites but I didn't want to deny the community an opportunity to flex their considerable photographic muscles.

well, you didn't say which enlarger, or, single filter or dual filters.

here is single
0= 90y
.5=70y
1=50y
1.5=30y
2=0
2.5=5m
3=25m
3.6=50m
4=80m
4.5=140m
5=199m

these numbers are for an enlarger that falls under the kodak setting which includes most common found on the US and canada borders.,

You really need to check for yourself, as we use 30m for grade 3 .

ann said:

well, you didn't say which enlarger, or, single filter or dual

Click to expand...

The Enlarger is a Durst L1200 with a CLS501 head with a max magenta setting of 140. I split print so don't generally require the middle filters. Thanks for the nummbers.

John

Go with straight d76 or xtol

Make take about 5 minutes, but you can batch process...

if i would read better, i would have saved some typing

try 70y for O with the durst
and 75m for 4

130 for grade 5 just in case

I have tried D76 with some papers and see a speed loss and contrast increase. With one paper (high chloride), I actually just about fixed it out in D76. The D76 high sulfite acted almost like a monobath.

As for filters, on my Besseler 45S Dichro, I find that about 45M is right for a #2 paper, and I have checked it out against a graded paper. I have 3 tables from 3 sources including the Ilford web site, and a stuffer in a box of paper, EK and one posting here and on PN. The result of these 5 sources resulted in 3 tables which disagree totally when using dichroic filters.

Now, enlarger types may differ, but a 0.1 or 0.5 density in Magenta should read 0.1 or 0.5 when read by a densitometer. Therefore, it is the source light which determines the actual balance not the filter itself, if we see such variations.

You will see that this results in a free for all where each enlarger has a different light balance coming out the lens, and therefore you have to self calibrate by using a graded paper first to check out your system.

As an example, if you had a very blue light source and compared it with a very red light source (daylight vs tungsten type) with zero filtration, you would get a different apparent grade of paper with that zero filtration on the same enlarger. You would not get a straight grade #2 or whatever....

Calibrate and don't be unsure.

PE

Thanx Don and Ann.

PM me an address and I would be very pleased to put you on my card list.

PE I agree and will do as you suggest once I decide to do B&W as anything more than an occassional thing -- Or more likely get a 2nd enlarger (people are almost paying to have these things taken away). As it stands, I have an old box of fb g2 kodak and 3 or four boxes of of MGIV in various flavours, I haven't the time nor inventory to do testing.

Thanks for the good advice.

I think you would get the best results using a paper developer and save the D-76 and Xtol for films. Film developers, other than universal developers, when used with paper may cause a low Dmax and low contrast.

This is a complete guess: X-tol is considered to be sharper than D-76? Thus, less sulfite? I'd go with X-tol 1+0 and lessen the problems with all the sulfite of D-76.

Durst had two filter numbering systems, one going to 170M maximum and the other to 130M max. Here are Ilford's recommendations for each system using MG IV RC. This is from Anchell's Variable Contrast Printing Manual.

Lee

Just typed this in by hand, so any mistakes are mine, all mine.

FWIW I went out and bought some Ilford Uni Paper Dev. and stayed up until 2:00am finishing the post cards 12 versions of ~10 postcards each. The Xtol worked as good or close to the Uni Dev, but took about 5 mins, where as the uni dev took maybe a minute.

70y and 70m worked very well for the soft and hard grades.

mrcallow said:

The Xtol worked as good or close to the Uni Dev,
but took about 5 mins, where as the uni dev took
maybe a minute.

Click to expand...

No surprise. The subject was brought up a few
days ago when discussing film vs paper developers.
There is no lack of developing agent in a film developer.
I estimate that films contain 3 to 4 times more silver
than papers per unit area. Developer enough to
process a roll of 120 or an 8 x 10 sheet of film
will be enough to handle 3 or 4 8 x 10 sheets
of paper.

I doubt there's a film developer out there that is
not also a good print developer. As I mentioned upping
the exposure made a very good print developer of D-23.
The most obvious method of turning a film developer
into a print developer is to up it's ph. Some sodium
carbonate would have done that.

At present it's a bit up in the air. When upping the
ph of a metol only developer a shift in gradation
has occurred which I'm not sure I like. More
exposure may be the approach. Dan