I have recently purchased DiXactol. I have a question relating to this developer In an instruction which I got it from the home page of Barry Thornton. It said RAll films take the same time regardless of make or speedS. Have any one tried for HP5+ , FP4+ and Agfa pan 400?(both in Two bath and Single bath) I would very much appreciate if any one can share the data. (I use small Masko tank)

-- Hirohiko Inatome (lamia@kh.rim.or.jp), August 12, 2000

Answers

AS no one has responded so far... I have not tested DiXactol so far as I have not seen it in Germany. But having used two bath developer I can tell you that most films have a similar processing time. The reason is the limit of adsorption of the film, a certain film can pick up a certain amount of developer in the first bath, most times will be around 4 to 5 mins (may vary with developer concentration). While development in the second bath is until the exhaustion of developer from first bath, so times for different films should be closed as in bath one.

Nether the less an improvement can be possible by fine tuning the times for individual films.

I do assume that a small Masko tank is a roughly 500 ml tank for inversion.

Wolfram

-- Wolfram Kollig (kollig@ipfdd.de), August 16, 2000.

For HP5+ DiXactol single-bath (compared to D-76 1:1) gives about a stop slower speed, big grain and high acutance (because of the big sharp grain) but doesn't resolve near as fine detail. It stains more brownish than PMK so shouldn't cause such extreme highlight compression when printing on VC paper.

After seeing such results, I didn't see any point in further testing.

Generally, two-bath developers give results that are fairly close with different films developed together or for the same time/temp/dilution. That's fairly close, as in printable, but certainly not the same. _Some_ pairs of films give essentially the same results when developed to the same specs in some developers while another film may be wildly different. It all depends on what films and what developers.

-- John Hicks (jbh@magicnet.net), August 16, 2000.