I use SPUR HRX and I think it's gives exceptional results for both FP4 and HP5.
If you are going to rotary process at 24 degrees centigrade, T-Max developer works well in my darkroom with just about any film. I have been using it for rotary processing since 1987.
Whatever you decide, make sure you use enough developer to complete the process. Processing sheet film in rotary drums with exhausted developer tends to under-develop the center of the sheet, making the edges look too dense.
I actually have a whole thread on this, it was so long that it got shut down, I did open a second thread called something like "that other sharpness thread" but it was all about the sharpness of the image when I switched to rotary processing and I used to enjoy FP4+ but found that I lost my sharpness when processing it in a rotary processor.
I ended up switching to Delta100, and although this seems counter intuitive, the developer I ended up with for this film was Rodinal at plain old 1:50
I actually surprised myself because I thought that Rodinal was very horrible for rotary processing, but it seems that the culmination of the fine-grained of Delta100 combined with Rodinal seems to give very sharp and fine-grained results even in a rotary processor.
Let me see if I can find example image from my testing results...
Ok this was the full image.
And this is a 1:1 crop near the edge of the snow shelf scanned at 2500dpi (I know we print here but for purposes of an example and grain discovery the scan should at least give you some info).
So anyway, I actually decided that I had to switch films because I could find no developer that gave me the same results as when I hand processed FP4+
However I do not do alternative printing like carbon etc. so I'm not worried about the fact that Delta100 isn't good for that unlike FP4+ which is supposed to be very good for that. Although I have no understanding of those alternative processes nor do I understand how one film could be good for it and one film could not, but I don't want to detract from the main point which is trying to figure out how to get the same results were good results or whatever with a rotary processor.
Good luck!
Perceptol 1+1 13 min
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