ATL 1500 rotary Dev time for Neopan 400 at 800 in D76 24 degrees c

[art_arkin]

After a several trials with 120 APX 100 in Rodinal Im finally getting my 1500 tamed for this

particular combo and its fabulous.

 

A couple of nights back I got full access to shoot a great concert here in London.

Amazingly Calumet was out of 35mm Tri-X so I went with Neopan 400 instead and rated

it 800. A bit of Googling has pretty much confirmed that straight stock D76 is a good way

to go with this particular push but all published times are for hand tank only. Do any of

you have a good ballpark for the rotary Dev time at 24 degrees c ? They are very important

photos and I cant afford to play around on this set.

 

They were shot using an F1.0 Leica Noctilux and a 1.4 35mm Summilux, a glass combo

which I find great for stage gigs at 400/800 and always ensures plenty of light reaches the

film.

 

Any help or thoughts greatly appreciated.

 

Many thanks in advance.

 

Arthur.

[gerry_szarek]

Unfortunately all the Kodak "official" information on Rotary processing times for D76 is for kodak film only. Kodak however does publish information on other films for Xtol however. You should however run test films first since I have seen significant time differences published for rotary processing from differnt print sources.

 

Good luck.

[rolfe_tessem]

The five-minute pre-wet on that ATL-1000/1500 brings the time to virtually the same as those published for small tank inversion processing.

 

I've had great results using my ATL-1000 with unfamiliar films by just following the times on the massive development chart:

 

www.digitaltruth.com

[art_arkin]

The 5min pre-wet seems to do the trick as far as even development and hitting target

time. It took a few films to realise this after starting at 1 min (bad bad bad it seems in a

1000/1500). Recently I read that 1 min is totally adequate in a rotary whilst the standard 5

min was not recommended but perhaps other developers combined with CPE / CPA

processors (as used by the person who suggested 1 min) yield different results from the

ATL 1k series.

 

Another thing I've noticed is that the time/temp compensation graph published by Jobo in

the ATL 1500 manual is significantly different from the seemingly standard curve

published elsewhere. Perhaps the 'standard' assumes hand tanks. Can anyone enlighten

me on this ?

 

A test is definitely called for but I cant simulate the lighting that these important pictures

were shot under. Neopan 400 will no doubt take tungsten stage lights differently from a

controlled lighting situation with a grey card or am I wrong ? I'd hate to end up with over

developed, blocked highlights.

 

Many thanks.

 

Arthur.

[gerry_szarek]

Arthur forgot to mention, do a search on the jobo site for pre wet and neopan, jobo changed recommendations on Tmax from a 5 minute prewet to NO prewet at all, of course they still have the "old" recommendation on the web site (just to confuse us) so you need to read ALL the information.

 

Does anybody know if neopan is constructed like Tmax and Delta films?

[rolfe_tessem]

I think on the ATL-1500 you have the ability to customize the programs. On my ATL-1000 the 5 minute pre-wet is hard-coded into the black and white programs -- you can't change it or turn it off. I've never had a problem.

 

I talked to Jobo about the whole 5-minute prewet thing, and it turns out that they came up with it solely to avoid having to test every film combination and come up with times for continuous agitation with no prewet. They found that 5 minutes gave times very close or identical to the published times for small tank inversion processing.

 

When Kodak released Xtol, the company did extensive testing in rotary processors and released times for rotory processing with no prewet. Kodak is not recommending *against* a prewet, it is just that somebody took the time to do the work to come up with these non pre-wet times for Xtol. You can also use the regular inversion tank time with the five minute pre-wet and come up with essentially the same results.