Anyone have any comments about the comparison of these two products? Is DiXactol functionally different from PMK?

-- Don Karon (dkaron@socal.rr.com), August 06, 2000

Answers

Don,

I have not yet used DiXactol, although I will do shortly. One of the threads below gives a link to Barry Thornton's site, where there is a lot of information on this developer. In short, it is a catechol/glycin mix, designed to be used as a two-bath developer, with sodium hydroxide as the accelerator (although it can be used single bath if desired.) The stain is indicated to be brown, as opposed to the yellow-green stain arising from pyrogallol based developers : the difference in the stain colour is supposed to effect the main difference between this and pyro in terms of the response of both graded and VC papers - the site has much more detail on this.

I have used PMK with some success, but not with TMax100, and I am hoping that DiXactol will work well with TMax. If it doesn't, then I'm going to rely on Rodinal/TMax as my principal combination.

-- fw (finneganswake@altavista.net), August 07, 2000.

DiXactol has become my developer of choice, although I generally use it as a single bath. Nowhere near as fussy as PMK with regard to agitation, temperature etc. Check Barry's site at: http://website.lineone.net/~barry-thornton/Default.htm

-- John Henry (johnh@piperschool.com), August 07, 2000.