Soak or no soak?

I've never soaked my negs, and everything looks fine. Don't see a need for it actually.

I lived in Hawaii too and never saw any difference in the water there compared to the mainland. Your water purity not only depends on which island you live on, but where on the island. On a lot of the Big Island there IS no city/county water to people's homes. They use home catchment, or drive and fill up jugs with county water at one spigot, with long lines of cars waiting to get to it. Truthfully, I never trusted the safety of the water there, and tried to always use bottled water for cooking or drinking. There's too many potential contaminants, and precious little policing of water sources. Most rivers have harmful bacteria and pesticide runoff in them, and there's the VOG from the currently erupting volcano putting tons and tons of dangerous contaminants into the air. That stuff drifts over to O'hau and Maui at least.

The reason it's a good idea to use distilled water is because there is no sediment in it to get on your negs. I filter everything through a funnel with a coffee filter inside.

I was about to try Ilford HP4 Plus 125 and was reading about it. The article I was reading stated that if I wanted finer grain and extreme sharpness I should use Ilford Delta 100 and "give it a good soak" before developing. When I first started developing, I would rinse Tri-X a couple times before pouring the developer. I wasn't too impressed with the sharpness but, this could be due to my scanning and/or other factors. Lately I've been loading the reels and going straight for the chemicals. I have achieved some excellent results with HP5 in 135 format and also with Delta 100 in 120 format. What exactly is meant by a "good soak"? I'm looking for sharpness and contrast in the details. Currently I'm using DD-X developer at 68 degrees.

IIRC, HP4+ is a standard grain film, that will have an anti-halation layer, but not so much as more modern T-grain films like Delta 100, Acros, T-Max, etc. Long ago I read it was useful to presoak these films in a 1 or 2% sodium sulfite solution about a minute or so with constant agitation, then rinse several times with tap water until the pouroff runs clear. As I use a glycin-ppd developer which, like Harvey’s 777 works best when reused & replenished, having a load of anti-halation goop building up in your developer is probably not good, so presoaking is a must.

Acros will give a blue pouroff that looks like Windex; after about four post-rinses, it seems to be fine for development. That said, using TF-4 to fix often gets a magenta or purple stain, and what that portends, I have no idea.

The main thing is to have a film base after fixing and washing that has little or no color cast. Then you know you’re OK.

FWIW, the best, sharpest, developer formula is Jay Defehr’s Obsidian Aqua; it will take your images to the limits of your lens’ resolving power! This comes at a slight thinning of tonality, without the lush look of D-76/ID-11. Defehr’s 510-Pyro will give nearly the sharpness of Obsidian Aqua, with a lush tonal range—and nearly invisible grain. Both formulae are staining: QA uses Catechol, 510 uses Pyrogallol.

The Caffenol family of developers also render sharpness & tone and are great with classic-grain films like HP4+.

Good luck!

Diafine instructions mention that it might turn color after a while.

Even a fairly dark liquid, especially with the bright pink dye that some have, won't have much effect.

T-Max has a pink color that stays if you don't fix long enough.

Instructions say that won't hurt the printing, though I suppose could slightly

increase the time.