Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/12/07

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Subject: [Leica] Eric/HC-110/D76/and film
From: Alastair Firkin <firkin@ncable.net.au>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 10:37:41 +1100

Eric,
This interests me (still stuck in the darkroom). I've been using HC-110 
in very dilute concentrations, and been pretty happy with the results, 
but I've not tested or done anything scientific: who has time ;-) I 
used to use D-76: are there any good works comparing the results of the 
different developers with the films that I could review? or is it all 
experience and personal preference

Cheers
On Monday, Dec 8, 2003, at 04:06 Australia/Melbourne, Eric Welch wrote:

> Sorry, I was not remembering it correctly, exactly. The film came 
> first, and shortly aftewards, when they sent us P3200 to test the 
> developer came along with it. With the explanation that TMax developer 
> (not what it was called when we were testing it) was specifically 
> created for pushing film. It was not designed to be a standard 
> every-day developer. It can function that way, though, and you can get 
> very good results. But the grain will not be minimized as in D-76 1:1.
>
> HC-110 was my developer of choice at the time. (Too fond of Ansel I 
> suspect). When I tried it with the first batch of TMY, it blew the 
> highlights out so bad it was nearly unpritable (as in you could get a 
> usable photo as long as you considered usable as in no highlight 
> detail. When the new developer came out, it was so much better I 
> didn't bother trying D-76 for a long time. We were so blown away by 
> what we could do with P3200 and that developer I think I didn't bother 
> using TMY or Tri-X for about two months, except when I shot outdoors. 
> Then I used TMX. This was while I was in grad. school at the 
> University of Missouri. There were several of us in the test and our 
> results were pretty uniform.
>
> So, HC-110 and TMax developer are substantially different. Phenodone 
> is used in a lot of developers (ID-11, no?) and the only similarity I 
> could detect is they both started out as liquids. HC-110 has a nasty 
> tendency to increase grain (something Ansel never bothered with 
> because by the time he shot 35mm on a regular basis, he was so old he 
> had no desire to experiment with a new film/developer/processing 
> combination).



Alastair

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Replies: Reply from Eric Welch <eric@jphotog.com> (Re: [Leica] Eric/HC-110/D76/and film)