RO9 special/studional six months from dulition.

Fomapan 200 test negatives.

I'm now six months down the line with this litre of RO9s/Studional and nine completed developments to date. With it now being three months on from it's suggested 'best before' time I started this processing session with the last seven frames from my out of date Fomapan 200, to check that the developer was still viable.

 The Fomapan was in the developer for eight minutes this included the 20% compensation for developers age. For me anyway this developer was now in completely unknown territory and the 20% adjustment was under review again. Although the last time I used the developer the urge to increase was very strong, I considered it again and dismissed the idea very quickly this time. Remembering what I had said last time.

Agfa APX 100 negatives

As soon as the film had been fixed I pulled it out of the developing tank to check. On first look it looked like it had not worked but on closer inspection there was a very good looking negative peering back at me. Great! Now I can get on with the others.

including the 20% and a roll of Fomapan 400 which stopped me in my tracks for a while as I had no suggested development times for it. Ah! What to do? I was processing this for someone else. Don't panic Mr Mannering. I checked through the Massive dev charts 400 ISO film times for Studional with dilutions of 1+15. It was saying that between four and eight minutes. Which is quite a leeway to pair down. I then looked at the Agfa and Rollei times for 400 ISO film to try and shrink the time difference. This helped a lot, it was suggesting five and a half minutes as an average. So me being me rounded it up to six and added 20% which worked out at a bit over seven minutes.

 I intended to develop for seven minutes and ended up doing eight I was interrupted loosing track of the time. It is possible that the mix up has made for a better developed set of negatives which may have worked in my favour this time. Which leaves a dilemma for the next roll - what time should I use?

Fomapan 400 negatives

All in all this out of date developer has proved its self to be a good performer, out of the three newly processed film the Fomapan 200 is disappointing in that the negatives are a bit thin. Some of this is to do with bad exposure and not the development. On closer inspection of this last length of film it looks as though the surface has been contaminated with sweaty finger marks, some scratches and a lot of dust marks on the negatives. Not surprising really seeing that the film has been cut into sections on three other occasions.

It turns out that the Agfa APX 100 has been over developed. I have also noted that the negatives are a bit more grainy than they should be. This could be the down side of using the RO9s outside the three month best before date.

So what now? The developer is good for another three film but I think it will be discarded for a new batch. The reason for using this developer in the first place is because of it's finer grain. If I want it coarse looking I'll use RO9.