Sprint developer

Has anyone ever used Sprint liquid developer? Is it good (on ilford

films)? Thanks.

I used a lot of it several years ago. It is fine. Pretty much your standard phenidone-hydroquinone type liquid concentrate similar to those many manufacturers put out. The shelf life of the undiluted concentrate seems pretty long, which is good. The developing times for Ilford films listed on the bottle were mostly right EXCEPT for Delta 100 which I found way too long.

It is my standard developer for FP4 (as well as other films I shoot other than Tmax (I use Tmax RS for the latter when shooting Tmax 4x5 quickloads). I have also developed HP5 and both Delta 100 and 400 in it.

 

Sprint is an excellent general purpose developer. For FP4 4x5 LF in an HP Combi tank I use 10 min, and it allows me to shoot FP4 at 125 EI/ISO (actually doing densitometer tesing on FP4 in Sprint I get a true speed of almost 200-250, but generally shoot at 125 to ensure good shadow detail. The times listed on the bottle are for a condenser enlarger, I add one "letter" equivalent for my diffusion enlarger. You need to look at the bottle or refer to their website to understand what I am saying. In general their instructions are well written and the times listed work well for me.

 

It is relatively safe, convenient, cheap and gives me good results. I couldn't ask for more. I have settled on it as my standard developer after some liimited experimentation with Xtol, D76 1:1, DDX and Tmax RS (I still use Tmax RS for Kodak Tmax film but more out of habit, I have gotten good results with Tmax in Sprint).

 

BTW Sprint developer is designed to give you somewhat similar results to D76 1:1 thouh it uses phenidone rather than metol.

 

Try it. I think you will like it.

 

Sincerely,

 

Hany.

Well said, Hany - I agree completely - just finished processing 15 rolls of HP4 in Sprint; they're drying now.