Greetings! As a Christmas gift, I received John P. Schaefer's "The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, Book 2". In Chapter 4, "Using Characteristic Curves to Evaluate Films and Developers" the author mentions using a 2 part developer for B&W negs. He gives an example recipe for this style of soup, saying it's commonly known as Farber AB.(posted 8938 days ago)Listed among this type of developers virtues are: Relative time and temperature insensitivity (claiming that 2 sheet film tests done at 68 and 80 F resulted in identical charicteristic curves), absurdly long shelf lives and re-useability, and finally claimed that film speed was not a factor either (ie, develop TriX, HP5+ and Plus X at the same time).
Drawbacks cited were: Relative inability to push/pull process or contrast-control (a la zone system) and the fact that one needs to do the alchemy oneself, making the soups from components such as hydroquinone, anhydrous sodium sulphite and elon/metol (whatever that may be). The author also suggests that while film developing is the same for different films, he makes the caveat of "with the possible exception of tabular-grain films", by which I presume he means T-Max and Delta films.
I've not seen a thread regarding this... does nobody use it? It seems to me that if it produces decent negs, it's ideal for somebody like myself who does quite a low volume of processing, of subjects that have a average contrast range.
I'm normally subscribed to the Medium Format Digest, but I thought this would be a better place to ask. Please excuse me if I've missed a thread somewhere that answered this already.
Thanks a lot! -Scot.