Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/11/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> So I've gotten this general impression that a substantial number of > folks aren't fans of stop baths for black and white negative film and > just slosh around water in its place which. > > So what's the thinking here? The stop bath gets in the way of fixing > later? Has some bad effect on film grain? I would assume that it would > be a good thing to quickly stop the development process. The short answer is that modern films and low pH developers (mostly phenidone/ascorbic acid) just don't need a stop bath any more. I have a completely odorless darkroom with no acetic acid smells and no MQ odors. Any dev with a time of over 7.5 min will work fine with just a water stop. > > Now when using very dilute devopers, like XTOL 1:3 where it's > essentially completely expired at the end of development, I can see > that just washing the film for 30 seconds with water might not be a > bad thing. But what about 1:1? Or some other developers? Water stop works fine with Xtol at all concentrations. JB