XTol-R and Jobo ATL2500 Start Up

Against my better judgment I'm switching us back to XTol replenished from Clayton F76+. I found the XTol results generally more pleasing and I like that it's eco friendly.

Right now I run the ATL2500 with the 15L sub tanks in re-fill mode. I'm going to mix 15L of XTol and run through it, collecting the used solution. I can replenish in 2 ways:

1. Track the # of rolls total over 15L. When I re-fill into the working sub-tank I will start by adding 70ml x that # of rolls, and then fill the remainder with the used solution to 15L, discard the rest.
2. Track the # of rolls over each processing run. Add the correct replenishment amount to the used-tank, refill the working sub-tank when the used-tank reaches 15L.

#2 may be problematic because I won't have gone through all the straight XTol before I completely fill the used solution tank. So...I should probably do #1.

Anyway figured I'd run this past the brain trust....

Seems like a good idea for economy.
Would using the Jobo Alpha developer be more consistent, or too expensive?

@NortheastPhotographic How many rolls do you process per day? I've always had problems with the 70ml per roll recommendation. Sometimes I needed more, sometimes I needed less. I blame my insufficient processing volume. From that perspective your situation is perfect!

If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't bother counting rolls at all. I never found that useful. Instead, I would pour the used developer back into the working tank after each run, and then drop a control strip into the last batch at the end of each day. Then, I would replenish in the morning according to the densitometer reading from the previous day. The replenishment amount would need to be determined experimentally, in terms of ml per 0.01 of HD-LD.

But... if your volume is too high, doing this once a day may not be frequent enough.

For B&W anywhere from 15 to 30 or so a day. I do have some B&W control strips but not sure I'd know how to translate a densitometer reading to L of replenisher. Also being a Jobo it's still just a bit laborious to process, dry, scan the strips.

NortheastPhotographic said:

For B&W anywhere from 15 to 30 or so a day. I do have some B&W control strips but not sure I'd know how to translate a densitometer reading to L of replenisher. Also being a Jobo it's still just a bit laborious to process, dry, scan the strips.

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I would use the recommendation of 70mL. It would be nice to have a "tank" of a fixed amount, old school 3.5 gallon was what Kodak used in the day. And use and replenish to the same tank.

NortheastPhotographic said:

I do have some B&W control strips but not sure I'd know how to translate a densitometer reading to L of replenisher. Also being a Jobo it's still just a bit laborious to process, dry, scan the strips.

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The initial calibration takes a bit of effort. I would run a control strip at the end of the 1st day, take a reading and write it down. Then replenish with 1L of fresh replenisher and run another strip right away. Compare the reading to the previoius one. Let's say the delta is 0.1. Now you know that each 100ml adds 0.01 of density [1]. That's all you need moving forward.

In terms of how laborous it is, that's subjective. Just one extra 35mm reel per day. I never bother drying the strips, just use a hair blower for a few seconds and straight to the densitometer they go.

[1] I do not know if replenisher volume and density have a perfectly linear relationship, but in practice this works really well.

You could make a crude, abbreviated "clothesline" chart and adjust replenishment based on the movement of a mid-point wedge value on the control strip.

Process your strip at your normal time/temp/agitation and measure a patch mid-scale. Make that your target density and each time you run a strip and plot it on the graph paper, watch where that density goes; loss of density means under replenishment and gain means you are over replenishing.

You can also informally watch the shape of the curve to insure the toe or shoulder isn't getting suddenly deviating from "normal"; this could alert you to a bad mix or some other problem.

Of course you cannot be ultra critical on the values as they will bounce around even in the most tightly controlled processing environments.

Establish a comfortable margin for error above and below the "correct" value as alert values. The measured point tends to dance above and below the line in an ongoing replenished system, but when the trend begins to bias up or down, you can make gentle corrections to try to nudge it back to center by either slightly increasing/decreasing replenishment rates.

I know a lot of this is sort of vague advice, but once you start doing it, you'll gain experience really quick and your confidence will grow with the knowledge you can steer the process to acceptable results with the throttle of replenishment.

Edit: I would suggest 0.5d above and below the target density. That is a third of stop for the target to "breathe" up and down. Random spikes just outside of these parameters is of no concern as long as the patch returns toward the target density values and doesn't keep climbing or diving.

Say that because the agitation scheme on a Jobo is random and more or less constant, but not like the full-impingement turb bars on motion picture processing machine that blast developer right on the surface of the emulsion.

Also, another factor is target density patch orientation in relation to agitation. In a motion picture processing machine, we took pains to orient the latent exposure on the test strip entering the developer bath from least to most exposure to avoid developer byproducts from dense areas influencing the lesser density areas.

Not possible on the Jobo and you have to allow for more variation.

So I'm up and running, replenishing. I ran all 15L of straight XTol and then re-filled as the used solution is now the 'seasoned' solution. Keep in mind I did not replenish yet. Over the course of this seasoned batch, after I do a processing run I add the correct amount of fresh XTol to the reclamation tank.

The problem I'm running into is that I'm going to end up wasting a fair amount of perfectly good XTol. The used XTol from a given batch goes all into the 15L reclamation tank, on top of that I add replenisher. Technically what I would be doing is capturing the batch just used, discarding the amount of replenisher I'm about to add, then adding in said replenisher, then returning that solution to the working tank. However here it's easier to just keep 100% of the just-used solution, adding replenisher onto that. When the 15L tank is full, I dump the current working tank and replace it with all the XTol I captured and replenished.

In that process I end up throwing out a bunch of perfectly good developer. That's technically true of any replenished solution I suppose but it seems more wasteful with this arrangement.

I haven't figured out a good way to capture the individual runs. The ATL2500 either dumps the solution into a 15L waste tank or can capture it into 1L tanks. I'm regularly using more than 1L in a single processing run though so it would overfill the smaller tanks! I might start capturing used dev into the 15L tank, then use an unused capture 15L tank to keep active the working solution until it's full and I can dump it into the working tank.

The ATL2500 is really not the ideal set up for running a replenished line I'm discovering. The easiest thing is probably for me to just accept the waste.

How many liters a day do you need to run?

Would it be possible to do your daily run, capturing the used developer into a couple of 15 liter tanks and waiting until the daily run is over? Then you could replenish the used developer and move it over into the working tank(s) for the next processing day and keep the replenishment routine to once a day, rather than interrupting the flow of processing.

BTW: I am not quite understanding why you think you are throwing away perfectly good developer in this scenario. The developer discarded has a certain percentage of exhausted developer and development byproducts that need to be removed on a continuous basis. Yes, some "good" developer will be discarded, but equally some exhausted developer and developing waste byproducts will be thrown out as well.

Not to be insulting, but you are discarding an equal amount of spent developer before you add the proper amount of replenishment developer, right?

IMHO, this is about the best way to run a replenished line on a Jobo, as it cannot be conventionally replenished like other line-based systems that use an overflow principal. In these systems, the replenishment is added via metered system as the machine runs, injecting in into the developer tank. It is based on volume of square inches of film being transported and the developer tank simply overflows to the drain without having to handle the entire mix.

With the "captive system" of a Jobo, at sometime in the process, you have to stop and do the replenishment manually.

In reality yes I do the replenishment at the end of the day or even 2 days of processing. I keep a log of every roll processed of course. You are probably right, this is just the best way to do it with this machine. I'll keep tinkering with the system.

The results i'm getting are night and day vs the Clayton F76+ I was using.

When the working strength tank gets low, add the required amount (based on # rolls processed) of replenisher to it, top off the volume from the reclamation tank, and discard the excess.
Check the results periodically with the control strips, and adjust the replenisher amount/processed roll accordingly.

NortheastPhotographic said:

In that process I end up throwing out a bunch of perfectly good developer. That's technically true of any replenished solution I suppose...

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Yes, it pretty much always happens, especially with a self-replenished developer (these require a relatively high replenishment rate).

I don't think there's much you can do about it unless, perhaps, if you are using a water prewash. If this is the case you would essentially be diluting the developer (slightly) via the carryover (due to wet film, etc.). So you might have to replenish slightly higher to compensate. So this extra replenisher, as well as the carryover prewash, increase the volume that you have to discard.

If you ARE using a prewash (and wish to continue with it) it might be worth considering to mix your Xtol in a more concentrated form. (No I have never tried this, nor even used replenished Xtol.) By way of explanation say, for example, that you replenish at a rate = 70 ml/roll, and the carryover of prewash = 10 ml/roll. So your effective "replenisher concentration" is 70/(70 + 10) = 7/8. So to counteract this dilution you could pretend that the carryover is part of your developer mixing process. So in this example of 10 ml/roll carryover you could say, "Well, for every 70 ml replenisher addition 10 ml is gonna come from the carryover. So when I mix the Xtol, for every intended 70 ml of solution I will mix it to only 60 ml (the missing 10 ml is added via prewash carryover)." This is about as simply as I can explain the principle.

Now in reality I'd guess that your carryover is higher than 10 ml/roll cuz it includes not only wet film, but all liquid remaining in the reel and inside of the tank. If you felt like investigating this you could, for example, weigh a dry tank (loaded with film) then after the prewash weigh it again (wipe off the external water). This would give you a good idea of the actual carryover. (Note that water weighs very close to 1 gram per ml.)

Now, you're on your own going this way. Like I've said I've never specifically tried this. And in my considerable experience with replenished systems, regenerating color developers (via custom-made commercial ion-exchange systems) and custom regeneration of color process bleach and blixes, it is not unusual for unanticipated problems to come up. So keep in mind this possibility. You might wonder, is it worth it economically? I sorta doubt it, but depends on your volume I guess. Where I come from we were running about 5 to 6 thousand US gallons per day of replenishers in color processes (mostly RA-4 paper process). With that sort of volume it doesn't take much of of a relative cost reduction to justify things.

One last comment regarding the waste. Since it is, as you said, perfectly good developer, you might have friends who develop at home. They might be glad to tap into your supply of Xtol waste.

I use a Jobo, I use straight XTOL in the 1500 series tanks, very low volume. I use and toss.

I'm not sure Kodak ever really looked at replenishment using rotary processing. I used replenishment when I used a 1 gallon "tank" size for 4x5 and reel film.

What MattKing says is the best approach for any replenishment scheme.

Another thing you could use XTOL 1:1 one shot, that's a very economical approach as long as you have room for the solution minimums.

mshchem said:

I'm not sure Kodak ever really looked at replenishment using rotary processing.

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Well, the Kodak datasheet for XTol actually quotes developing times for seasoned XTol with rotary tubes.
From the XTol datasheet J-109:

MattKing said:

Well, the Kodak datasheet for XTol actually quotes developing times for seasoned XTol with rotary tubes.
From the XTol datasheet J-109:
View attachment 373108

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Yes, you are right. I forget sometimes. I love XTOL. Last I ran replenished was using 1/2 gallon hard rubber tanks for 4x5.

MattKing said:

Well, the Kodak datasheet for XTol actually quotes developing times for seasoned XTol with rotary tubes.
From the XTol datasheet J-109:
View attachment 373108

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Ah, today I ventured out with my old but still great Fujica G617, TMY-2 . I decided to soup the film, I don't like to wait. I double checked times.

There's nothing listed for XTOL, replenished, in rotary tube for T Max 400 films, just blank spaces on the chart.

mshchem said:

I use a Jobo, I use straight XTOL in the 1500 series tanks, very low volume. I use and toss.

I'm not sure Kodak ever really looked at replenishment using rotary processing. I used replenishment when I used a 1 gallon "tank" size for 4x5 and reel film.

What MattKing says is the best approach for any replenishment scheme.

Another thing you could use XTOL 1:1 one shot, that's a very economical approach as long as you have room for the solution minimums.

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Can't do 1:1 as you are supposed to mix and use immediately. I make 15L at a time and that usually lasts a week with the machine self-filling the tempering tank. F76+ was great for this because I found the 1:9 mix lasted a very long time...at least as long as it took me to use the 15Ls. The problem is, XTol negatives just look significantly better.

NortheastPhotographic said:

Can't do 1:1 as you are supposed to mix and use immediately. I make 15L at a time and that usually lasts a week with the machine self-filling the tempering tank. F76+ was great for this because I found the 1:9 mix lasted a very long time...at least as long as it took me to use the 15Ls. The problem is, XTol negatives just look significantly better.

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Yes, XTOL is the greatest of all time. I suspect that what you are doing is going to be just fine. You are processing a lot of film, that's great to hear!!!

MattKing said:

Well, the Kodak datasheet for XTol actually quotes developing times for seasoned XTol with rotary tubes.
From the XTol datasheet J-109:
View attachment 373108

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That works for the films that Kodak tested XTOL for, using no presoak in rotary processing. For those not tested by Kodak, we XTOL users in JOBO rotary processing are at the mercy of JOBO: 5 minute water pre soak followed by the processing times prescribed by the film's manufacturer. I don't process that much film, so I have no issue using it one shot. I've had success using this method for a few years (nothing compared to your time, but it works for me!)

I'm glad that you're changing XTOL. I was recently looking for a lab, but it had to be one that uses XTOL, since I like the results with that developer. The lab I previously used for a few years (in Berkeley) switched from XTOL to Ilfotec, and I didn't like the new results. I just mailed a batch to a lab in NYC (that also uses XTOL), but will try to get some test rolls sent to you when I have another film batch.

Dale

I have been using XTOL and replenished XTOL for many years, mainly replenished XTOL. I have found it to be very forgiving and quite reliable, while providing fine grain, sharp and has great tonality. When properly sealed XTOL is very stable will last for over a year. I highly recommend it.