dennis_oconnor3

I agree with Dennis, you are going to be in the ballpark... But, given the variables in shutters, glass, and emulsions, doing the testing over witht he MF camera and lens you are actually using may be, illuminating...

denny

Anything worth doing is worth doing right... Buy a few rolls of Tri-X with the thicker (relative) estar base - shoot em up on anything, experiment on shadows, or converging lines, or repetition... Then work at rolling the negs onto an SS reel... Sooner or later it clicks like , "ahaaa!".. And you will be one of those saying, "it's easy,anyone can do it"... Since these are throw away shots, you can unwind and rewind until you get it down pat... So what if you kink the film trying...

I have never used anything but SS reels and a while back at another fellas darkroom I went to put a roll of 120 T-max onto his plastic reel with the old twist of the wrist routine... It was a humid day and you talk about swearing, I thought the fixer would boil... He finally admitted he had the same problem with thin films and was hoping I would show him the "trick" for getting it to feed onto the reel... The trick turned out to be digging out the SS reel he never learned to use and in 10 seconds flat I had it loaded and popped into the daylight tank... When the lights came on I was dripping sweat from struggling with that plastic spawn of Satan... Never again...

denny

I have test alliquots of XTOL in both partially full and full test bottles... It was mixed in Oct 04... Next test is due on the 1 year anniversery of the stock solution being mixed... The 3 month, and 6 month, and 9 month, tests gave perfect negatives off the clip roll compared to the negs made the day it was mixed... If the 1 year test is good (no reason for it to not be good according to the tests so far) I will simply use this old batch up on current negatives and forget about the so called "xtol failures"... My opinion based on testing is that KODAK solved it...

Cheers ... Denny

Old, wannabe photographer, in Michigan...

I just bought a fresh 5L pack of XTOL from the Kodak store yesterday... Got the old package of big and small bags... I suspect their rate of turnover is way down... Digital is changing everything...

denny

You do agitate vigerously for the first ten seconds and then give the tank a firm thunp on the counter before setting it into the tempering bath, of course...

Automatic film developer machines don't presoak anything...

I have not presoaked film in 50 years of banging around in darkrooms - I don't get streaks or air bells... It works for me, so why change it...

As far as temperature control for roll film, I use the extremely high tech method of a largish plastic dishpan (pink, BTW) half full of 68 deg. water, with all the chemicals in mason jars standing in the tempering water... I rarely see a change in the temperature in the 8 - 9 minutes it takes to soup a negative, and even then it is a tenth of a degree at most...

denny

A year back I did a big thrash of 6 developers and 6 films... Made comparison prints till I was punchy... Used a standard target, same enlargement ratio, etc., etc., yadda, yadda..

Anyway, one of the things I noted about TMax 100 was that it liked D-76 (no surprise as Kodak tweaked it to perform in this old soup.) but it also was very happy in XTOL...

And, for those who worry about the XTOL failure gremlin, I used part of the 5 liters (damn that's a pain to make up in jugs when I am standardized on gallon jugs. So, I use an enamel 12 quart, food canning pot, to mix the soup and then funnel it into the jugs.) Anyway, as I was saying I used part of that XTOL mix a year ago and left the gallon jug, 1/2 full set for a year... I just did a test clip this week on a flashed roll of film in the year old XTOL and it developed... I did not do a quality analysis as I was simply looking to see if it failed... It did not... I would not use a partially oxidized, year old soup for real negs, anyway - just a test... Kodak says 1 year in a full jug and a month or two in a partial jug... I no longer worry about XTOL failing...

Finally, and to get back on topic, the original poster will benefit greatly from this link in calibrating his ASA and developing time - I know I did...

http://www.apogeephoto.com/mag2-6/mag2-6mfcalib.shtml

cheers ... denny