the unofficial Cosina-Voigtlander User Community

We have now entered an era of black/white film becoming scarce (and expensive!).You walk into a camera store and ask for tri-X and their eyes cross and&nbsp; &quot;what is that?&quot;. These days i stock up on film and at the moment there is about a mile and a half in the freezer and i have ordered another 4000 ft for June delivery.<br /> There is no question that if you shoot bl/w you have to develop it yourself. The cost goes overboard otherwise and the quality is not very good.<br /> The idea of buying &quot;ready made&quot; developers is actually a fairly recent one. In the early 60&#039;s you made your own (the 60&#039;s was a bit chemically oriented though) and I never stopped. I do keep some D76 and some Microdol X sitting around, mainly for decorative purposes. Of course there are the ever present Rodinal bottles too for when you have no idea how to soup something (try Rod. 1:100 for 20 minutes and something will show up).<br /> If you are shooting bl/w essential reading is Steve Anchell&#039;s &quot;The Dark room cook book&quot; and the &quot;Film Developing Book&quot;. It is not alchemi or anything like that. There are some basic ingredients that you need and if you buy bulk, it gets really cheap. A pair of digital scales (ex-drug dealer at police auctions!).<br />You will need developing tanks (I use Paterson tanks and reels, mainly because I have at leats 10 tanks and close to 100 reels around), but stainless reels are fine, once you find out how to load them and also how to get the cap off the tank afterwards!<br /> The beauty of the Bessa line of cameras and lenses is that it will allow you access to high performance cameras and lenses at a cost that is reasonable. It also gives you access to cutting edge stuff like the 35f1.2, 12f5.6 and 15/4,5 and 21/25/28&#039;s that does not break the bank and if you spend the money you saved on film, instead of expensive pseudo german cameras you will do fine!<br /> One of the simplest developer there is, is the Kodak D 23, it contains two components -Metol and Sodium Sulphite. It will give you decent negs with &quot;old style&quot; emulsoins like Tri X/HP 5 and it works remarkably well with the ERA 100/Pan F/Plus X.<br /> If you are scanning negs, all you need for &#039;souping your own&quot; is a changing bag for loading tanks and sufficient space to store developer and fix. You also need a consistent water supply and a place to hang the film to dry.<br /> Darkroom is one area where chemical dependency is OK.<br /> Tom A

I used to mix my D-23 using the &quot;scoop method&quot;.&nbsp; I used measuring spoons to add the appropriate amount of Metol and Sodium Sulphite.&nbsp; About as simple as you can get, and is great stuff, and the Kodak Bulk Chemical bottles I had lasted me ten years, before I finally threw them out.<br /><br />BTW Welcome Tom

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<br />You will need developing tanks (I use Paterson tanks and reels, mainly because I have at leats 10 tanks and close to 100 reels around), but stainless reels are fine, once you find out how to load them and also how to get the cap off the tank afterwards!<br />

Wow, I thought I had a lot of tanks and reels. I have 4x patterson double tanks, 2x patterson 1 roll tanks, and 1x 1, 2, and 4 roll steel tanks.<br /><br />What I like about the steel tanks is volume and economy...a 4 roll steel tank can be loaded in a medium changing bag (it&#039;s about the same size as a plastic 2-roll tank). What I hate about them is the reels...a pain to load, more difficult for the negs to &#039;straighten out&#039;, and I always get a crinkle or two . If the negs are important, I use the patterson tanks.

There are a couple of intersting developers for your basic films. Patrick Gainer, a retired NASA guy did come up with my favourite a while ago. It is called PCK, using Ascorbic Acid (Vitamine C), Phenodine and Kodalk ( balanced alkali - sodium metaborate).<br />It has several advantages, it can be mixed in room temperature and as it is a 2-component developer, storage life is long. If you go to &quot;unblinking eye.com&quot; the formula should be there.<br /> I have been using it for at least 5 years now and it will give you a finer grain, albeit a distinct grain, than D-76. There is no Sodium Sulphite to &quot;mush&quot; it up. Times are around 6-7 minutes for Tri X and 6minutes for ERA 100/Lucky 100 and 8 minutes for Lucky 400. <br /> Of course if you use films like the ADOX/Efke 25 or Pan F - nothing beats Beutler. This was developed by Willy Beutler for Leica in the early 50&#039;s to highlight the quality of Leica lenss. Not super fine grain, but razor sharp! You will now a/how sharp your lens is and b/how good your focussing is. It takes no prisoners!<br />I occasionally use it for Tri X, heavily textured grain but great shadow detail.<br /> The &quot;scoop&quot; process works well for D-23. My only problem with the D 23 is that on more modern emulsions it will give a higher base fog. It is not really a problem, but looks ugly. You can add a 1% solution (10ml/1000ml) of Benzotriazole (anti-fog) to the developer and that will help - although if you add too much you will slow down the film speed.<br /> A whilw ago I did a scanning job on my different films and developer on our Flickr site. If you go to &quot;Rapidwinder.com&quot; you can find a link to the set. Scanned flickr images are not perfect for this purpose, but it gives you an idea how the tonality works.<br />Tom

I have some Ilford Perceptol that I got really cheap. I think it&#039;s a fine grain developer. Has anyone here tried it?

I also have a bunch of Perceptol in the &quot;Film Developing&quot; cabinet. It is a fine grain developer and works very well with some of the slower films. Films like Pan F+ and even the +X from Kodak look very good. It has a tendency to slow down the film somewhat so expose accordingly. I run Pan F+ at 32 ISO and Plus X at 80. Works well with Tri X/Double XX although the inherent grain in these films make it less spectacular.Pick up a 100 ft roll of PanF+ and shoot a couple of test rolls and once you have decided on te ISO, have fun and shoot the rest! If you decide to stay with Tri X or any other 400 ISO film, rate them at 250/320 and try it.<br />Tom A