Developing old Super-XX: Can I do better?

[BarryS]

I tried adding 15 ml/liter of 1% benzotriazole to the developer and increasing the development time to 22 minutes. The negatives were unacceptably thin and still look like they have some base fog. It seems like I'll just need to print through the base fog and maybe forget the idea of albumen prints. I'll try tray development with some HC-110 or D-76 next. Even if I can up the DR and DMax, I'm concerned that the base fog will make my print times too long. I'm shooting two sheets of everything, so I'll have a full undeveloped set once I get it dialed in.

[sun of sand]

The antifoggant restrainers would increase contrast as well as slow the emulsion speed and increase grain of an already grainy enough film
Excellent expansion capability

Could try moderate restrainers and lose some amount of fog minor amount to 1 stop of speed
gain minor grain and contrast

Develop longer in more accutance developer
Rodinol works and ABC pyro also worked very well for old film base fog

[sun of sand]

Well that's about a moderate level of anti fog
I do believe combining bromide with it helps for some reason
Maybe 10ml 1% and 4ml bromide
Expose at 50-64

At some point the film ends up less than useful trying this

[emh]

Barry- I can hook you up with a few sheets of fresh FP4, if it will help.
Eddie

[BarryS]

Barry- I can hook you up with a few sheets of fresh FP4, if it will help.
Eddie

Eddie--Thanks for the offer, but I think I can figure out a way to make the Super-XX work for some kind of printing. I have some Delta 100 on order from the Ilford ULF run, but it would be a shame to waste all this film.

[Peter De Smidt]

Pyrocat MC gives a bit lower fog than HD. MC also builds density a bit quicker.

[emh]

Eddie--Thanks for the offer, but I think I can figure out a way to make the Super-XX work for some kind of printing. I have some Delta 100 on order from the Ilford ULF run, but it would be a shame to waste all this film.

When you're ready to sell some of the Super-XX, let me know. It would work well for my no camera/no lens photos.

[jnantz]

hi barry

do you have any dektol or ansco 130 ?
they are active, and will not fog your film up as much ..
for ansco i would suggest 1:6 for about 7-8.5 mins
dektol i haven't used as much but about the same would be OK as well ..

have fun !
john

[JW Dewdney]

personally i wouldn't use an anti fog but rather just a cutting reducer after the fact.

[BarryS]

After some experimentation, I decided that Pyrocat HD isn't going to work for me--the film speed loss is too severe--maybe an EI of 12 or 25. The benzotriazole also knocked down film speed much faster than it suppressed base fog. It seems like you can alter dmax and DR with a lot of methods, but moving the needle on the base fog can only be done at the expense of film speed or dmax. Using HC-110 dilution B for 6.5 minutes didn't appreciably affect base fog, but gives me an EI of 100 and plenty of density. Pulling development to 5 minutes just knocks down the density.

Here's a low-contrast scene, and printing through the fog (Ilford MGIV) is no problem with magenta filtration equivalent to about grade 4.



Super-XX starts to act interesting with high contrast scenes. The density keeps building without compressing the highlights. This shot is with no filtration (grade 0) and the silver gelatin paper can't quite match the DR of the film. A reasonably fast self-masking alternative process (salt printing?) might be possible.