Hello and my question is this- Has anyone had any extended experience using Photographer's Formulary's FX-2 developer? I currently like Neopan almost regardless of developer(within reason), and my former high school teacher ( who has an incredible amount of experience)loved the combination. I unfortunately have been unsucessful in contacting him, as he has left the country. I have stock for 80 litres of the solution, and would like to put it to good use, sort of a head-start.

-- Mike DeVoe (cameraservice@gci.net), January 21, 2001

Answers

FWIW I've used TFX-2 with TMX; EI, CI, curve shape, graininess and acutance are identical to Rodinal 1:100.

Or to put it differently, with TMX at least it gives higher acutance and slightly more graininess than D-76H 1:1, with a slight shouldering on the high end. I'd expect about the same with Neopan.

Supposedly TFX-2 is an "improved" version of FX-2 for t-grain type films. Here's a tidbit from Anchell & Troop; "Crawley suggests Pinacryptol should not be added to FX-2 when developing tabular grain films."

That's probably the difference.

-- John Hicks (jbh@magicnet.net), January 24, 2001.

I have used FX2 quite a bit with 120 film and found that it works best with FP4 or Verichrome as a stand developer. The problem is that occasionally the film has streaks (bromide drag?) that cannot be corrected. Using HP5 with it for 25 minutes, agitation 10 sec per minute, normal dilution with distilled water is beautiful for 35mm film. Gutsy, sharp grain, nice midtone separation. Good luck!

-- paige critcher (pcritcher@sbc.edu), February 14, 2001.

I too have used FX-2 as a stand developer for the slower films. It works great for PlusX,FP4+ and my favorite Verichrome Pan. It didn't seem to produce as nice a negative with HP5+, TriX and the faster films as it did the slower. Just recently, for grins, I did a roll of Kodak Infrared in FX-2 using the one hour stand development method. The negatives came out fine and were not a problem to print. Actually it was a test roll using different metering, a no. 25 red filter, 87c filter and a combination of the red with a polarizer. I would use this development again with a roll of infrared! No problem.

-- Rick Obermeyer (obermeyer_rick@si.com), July 18, 2001.