Thanks, Greg.

Are using your SRARK with PMK and / or Pyrocat? My experience with PMK for example with tray processing is even with long presoak, it's very easy to get streaking if film is not completely submerged in developer very quickly. You results are promising as my home space requirements / restrictions are similar to yours. The CPP3 is awesome, but belongs to my place of work.

Quote Originally Posted by Greg View Post
I take the drum off the Stark to manually fill and drain it. It's amazing how fast one can manually fill the drum. One trick is to slightly tilt the drum when filling it. I always use a water bath before the developer, and my shortest processing time with conventional developers is 11 minutes. Ran a test sheet and there was no discernible uneven development. If one does not use a pre-developer water bath and if one's development time is less than say 5 minutes, yes there might be some uneven development. For testing lenses and to save time, I have processed those negatives in a low dilution of Rodinal for 5 minutes without the water bath... contact prints from the negatives did not show any uneven development. For processing negatives that I will be scanning I use no water bath and develop in Diafine A & B. I also have increased the developing times in the A and B solutions to 5 minutes each. Again no discernible uneven development. My rule of thumb has always (with the exception of lens test negatives) been to use developers or modify them so as to never have developer times of less than 10 minutes. I once did own and use a slightly modified CPA or CPP (forget which is which). Loved it but its width was over 3 feet and I had to remove it from the sink when processing prints. The STARK's width is only 2 feet, and now I don't have to remove it when processing prints. Plus my vertical Kostiner print washer sits behind the STARK.

Derailing the thread for bit... Well many times I have found this happening and leading to a more interesting thread.