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Hc110 Help!


hiromix

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I'm new to developing film and I've been looking at different forums but the information I've read seems a little scattered.

 

I just want to develop 1 Roll of 35mm film tx400. Dilution B from concentrate.

 

to make dilution b it's 0.5ml to 8oz of water, right??

 

thanks

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I have a 10ml graduated cylinder, though it still isn't so easy to measure.

 

I sometimes make up 1L or so at once, and so about 32ml of concentrate.

I have a 250ml graduated cylinder with 1ml increments. I put some water in, measure that, then add concentrate.

I can swirl it around to wash concentrate off the wall, so it is all measured.

Then I figure out how much it will make, add the appropriate amount of water to the bottle.

 

Another way is to use a large plastic syringe (no needle) to extract from the concentrate bottle, and add to a bottle with water.

-- glen

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The info sheet for HC110 recommends making up a fairly concentrated stock solution, to avoid always having to dose the viscous syrup; but I prefer to do make up straight from the syrup, so as not to have both the syrup and a stock solution to store.

I use a graduated pipette which I nicked from a skip (=dumpster) at the university where I used to work, to dose developer concentrates. I guess it's no more convenient than a syringe would be. The pipettes are glass, and I will run out of them soon, as I'm pretty clumsy.

I mostly use a 1/64 dilution (I found people on the web talking about this as 'dilution H', which Kodak don't list). Mostly you can take the times for dilution B and double them for the more dilute solution. That's one of the reasons people use it - to get longer times so little time errors matter less. Another reason is to get some compensation - if you don't agitate much, the developer starts to run out in the more exposed areas (the highlights), and that lets the shadows catch up a little.

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I used to buy HC-110 when it came in 500 ml bottles. I would mix that with water 1:3 to get 1.5L of stock solution. When it was time to make a working solution to develop the film I usually needed 600ml of developer to cover two reels so I would dilute the stock solution with water 1:7 (dil B) or 75 ml stock to 525 ml water. It was a lot easier to measure those amounts and I had mixed stock solution that lasted over a year until I used it all up.

 

I suppose now that the HC-110 comes in one liter bottles people don't want to have 3 liters of stock solution to store.

James G. Dainis
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Times with Dilution B for Tri-X 400 are quite short; I've always opted for Dil. E or H with Tri-X to get longer development times. I mix working solution directly from syrup, 9.4ml for 300ml for Dil.B (my tank needs 300ml per roll - depends per tank though). Clear site with information that I've found most useful: http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/hc110/.
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  • 3 months later...
I'm new to developing film and I've been looking at different forums but the information I've read seems a little scattered.

 

I just want to develop 1 Roll of 35mm film tx400. Dilution B from concentrate.

 

to make dilution b it's 0.5ml to 8oz of water, right??

 

thanks

 

I was just doing 400TX in HC-110 last night. I use 7.5ml of concentrate (NOT stock solution) to 472.5ml water. 12 min development @20C, agitation 5 seconds/min. This is dilution H (1:63), and it works consistently for me developing either 1 or two rolls in a dual-reel tank.

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I was just doing 400TX in HC-110 last night. I use 7.5ml of concentrate (NOT stock solution) to 472.5ml water. 12 min development @20C, agitation 5 seconds/min. This is dilution H (1:63), and it works consistently for me developing either 1 or two rolls in a dual-reel tank.

 

Theory says that you should only do one roll with that much, but then again ...

 

The table says 3.75 minutes for 20C and dilution B.

 

Doing two rolls, you should increase the time some, and also for dilution H.

 

It seems to me, though, that you are nearing stand development.

 

http://imaging.kodakalaris.com/sites/prod/files/files/resources/f4017_TriX.pdf

-- glen

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Theory says that you should only do one roll with that much, but then again ...

 

The table says 3.75 minutes for 20C and dilution B.

 

Doing two rolls, you should increase the time some, and also for dilution H.

 

It seems to me, though, that you are nearing stand development.

 

http://imaging.kodakalaris.com/sites/prod/files/files/resources/f4017_TriX.pdf

 

I'm not claiming its optimal, but its been giving me scannable negatives consistently. I can't figure out how to link to samples from my portfolio, but I have a handful from this weekend up there which are all scanned at 2700dpi and minimally processed in Lightroom: point curve to 'strong contrast' and a touch of sharpening.

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I have never tried stand development.

 

I did once try a more diluted developer and longer time, with TP, but the result was blank negatives.

Too diluted, and/or not enough time.

 

It is an interesting combination, though.

-- glen

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It seems to me, though, that you are nearing stand development.

 

12 minutes isn't remotely close to stand development? Many use the 1:63 unofficial Dil H as normal development, as it works just fine and makes times a bit safer (3:75 min is a bit awfully short). 12 min for 400TX (tri-X) sounds about right to me. The only thing, if I am not misinformed, is that you always need a minimum of 6ml concentrate present, so the minimal amount of solution when using Dilution H is 380ml. I use this quantity structurally (for a single rol), and never had an issue with it.

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He is doing two rolls, I assume 36 exposure, in 480ml, or 3.75ml concentrate per roll.

 

What I actually said was "nearing stand development".

 

Yes it isn't stand, but the available developer is less than usual, so the solution will be somewhat weaker than usual toward the end of development.

-- glen

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He is doing two rolls, I assume 36 exposure, in 480ml, or 3.75ml concentrate per roll.

 

What I actually said was "nearing stand development".

 

Yes it isn't stand, but the available developer is less than usual, so the solution will be somewhat weaker than usual toward the end of development.

 

Yes, I'm doing two rolls, which works out to 3.75ml of concentrate per 36-exposure roll. This discussion has made me curious, I am going to run a single roll in a full double roll tank this weekend (no changes to time/temp/volume) to see if the negs have a different look to them. 12 min @20C is longer that either Koday or Massive Dev Chart specs, so now I'm wondering if I've been getting decent results because of a fortuitous combination of lower concentration and longer time. It's kind of nice that at 7.5ml per two rolls, one bottle of HC110 should last for the rest of my life :)

 

Here are two samples of the results I'm getting, one indoors and one outside on a sunny day, from the same roll. These have had only minimal work in Lightroom (adjust point curve to 'strong contrast', sharpen a touch):

 

 

18417908-orig.jpg.54be6bed6fc20f7649e9509de7a3956c.jpg

 

 

18417916-orig.thumb.jpg.54e3755c1ed96f71a3a826ab0a1254a7.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

The exterior shot looks too low in contrast to me. I suspect you're not using enough developer per film.

 

You can roughly tell if development is correct by looking at the fully fogged and processed leader of the film. If you hold this in contact with a newspaper, the blackened film should be too dark to read the print through. If you can still read through the fogged leader, then your development time is too short or the developer too weak.

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Annoyingly, the datasheet for HC-110 doesn't give minimum quantities of concentrate per film. However, from the capacity table it appears that 12.5ml of concentrate per 10x8 sheet, or 36exp 35mm roll is recommended.

 

According to Kodak; dilution F (1:79) will only develop 1 sheet or roll per litre, while dilution D (1:39) has a capacity of 2 sheets/rolls, and dilution C (1:19) can develop 4 rolls per litre.

 

If you calculate the amount of concentrate used in each case it works out at 12.5ml of concentrate per film. That's well over 3 times the amount you've been using Joe!

 

There's probably a reason that Kodak recommend dilution B, and not some daft madey-uppy "dilution H" that's not even on Kodak's radar.

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Annoyingly, the datasheet for HC-110 doesn't give minimum quantities of concentrate per film. However, from the capacity table it appears that 12.5ml of concentrate per 10x8 sheet, or 36exp 35mm roll is recommended.

 

According to Kodak; dilution F (1:79) will only develop 1 sheet or roll per litre, while dilution D (1:39) has a capacity of 2 sheets/rolls, and dilution C (1:19) can develop 4 rolls per litre.

 

If you calculate the amount of concentrate used in each case it works out at 12.5ml of concentrate per film. That's well over 3 times the amount you've been using Joe!

 

There's probably a reason that Kodak recommend dilution B, and not some daft madey-uppy "dilution H" that's not even on Kodak's radar.

 

The unofficial dilution H isn't that unusual. It's hard to show in a picture, but the leader easily passes the newsprint test.

 

I recently developed one roll rather than 2 in the same volume, and the negatives don't look noticeably different. IMG_20170911_181111.thumb.jpg.04edc5d91b1bcf0299f3d61383f8d853.jpg

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Annoyingly, the datasheet for HC-110 doesn't give minimum quantities of concentrate per film. However, from the capacity table it appears that 12.5ml of concentrate per 10x8 sheet, or 36exp 35mm roll is recommended.

 

According to Kodak; dilution F (1:79) will only develop 1 sheet or roll per litre, while dilution D (1:39) has a capacity of 2 sheets/rolls, and dilution C (1:19) can develop 4 rolls per litre.

(snip)

 

Those are for trays. For tanks the capacity is twice as high, or the required concentrate half as much.

 

Maybe they consider aerial oxidation in trays, reducing the capacity.

 

http://imaging.kodakalaris.com/sites/prod/files/files/resources/j24.pdf

 

Presumably there is a reasonable margin of safety on those numbers.

There is no suggested increase in time, unless I missed it, for later rolls,

though they do give increases for some other developers.

-- glen

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I was put off using the tank capacities by the "NR" for dilution F. However it does appear that around 6ml per film is adequate, and I must admit that the fogged leader density looks about right.

 

What doesn't look right is the (low) contrast of the bright sunlit cityscape, while the interior shot shows the hallmarks of a compensating developer, with extremes of contrast being compressed.

 

I guess the only way to arrive at the real minimum quantity would be to do strict tests measuring the Dmax and/or known exposure scales with a fixed dilution and varying total volumes of HC-110.

 

Personally, I feel I've wasted enough of my life testing film & developer combos. It's far easier, in the end, to trust that Kodak, Ilford or whoever have done the spadework for you, and to follow their recommendation, or close to it.

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With the rated capacity, you get over 100 rolls (135-36 or 120) per liter of concentrate.

 

It used to come in 16 US fl. oz. bottles, slightly more convenient.

 

For the prices of the concentrate, it isn't so expensive.

 

For comparison, the rated capacity of D-76 is one roll per 240ml, which is somewhat

expensive if you buy the one quart bag. Maybe not so bad with the 1 gallon bag.

 

I suspect that in my early days, that I kept my D-76 longer than that, not yet

knowing about capacity limits.

-- glen

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