Capacity of Ilfosol-S?

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OK. So I've done a lot of searching for this question and I've been completely unable to find the answer except for a vague post from July that I'm not sure is accurate. So the question: what is the capacity of Ilfosol-S? Ilford is absolutely useless in this regard as they don't publish the info. The post I mentioned seems to indicate ~50mL per 35mm/120 roll. Has this been other's experience as well? If so, that will certainly slow down my developing procedures since my dev tank only holds ~450mL of liquid and 1+9 dilution will test this fluid capacity.

Anyway, thanks in advance!

-- Nicholas Barry (nbpn@isolation.net), November 14, 2001

Answers

Anchell & Troop's position is a universal 250 ml per 80 square inches of film. Based on that and 1:9 dilution, 25 ml of Ilfosol-S concentrate should be adequate for a 135-36 or 120 roll. I'm using 375 ml when processing 120 TMX at 1:14 and have seen no evidence of insufficient capacity.

-- Sal Santamaura (santamaura@earthlink.net), November 14, 2001.

I use a 1+9 solution in a tank that only holds 225ml of solution for developing single 36 exposure/35mm films. This is 22.5ml of concentrate, and gives identical results to those I get from a 450ml double tank, and a 900ml quad tank, loaded with either 35mm or 120m or 220 film. I get good, consistent, easy printing negative densities at Ilford's recommended times with just 22.5ml per film, (or 45ml for 120/220) so I suspect that even this is nowhere near the lower limit.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), November 15, 2001.

Well, I performed a test (finally) on Ilford PanF+ (@E.I. 50) using Ilfosol-S at 1+14 dilution. I shot a basic scene that was in direct sunlight with quite a bit of contrast.

What I found is that with 450mL of solution at 1+14 dilution I still obtained strong negatives that are quite easy to scan (I exclusively print digitally). Since the scene was rather bright and the full roll was exposed (therefore, a fair amount of exposed silver, not just five to ten frames), I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you can get away with as little as 15mL of stock Ilfosol-S per roll (as the volumes were 30mL of Ilfosol-S and 420mL water).

If somebody else would like to refute this please put me in my place. :)

-- Nicholas Barry (nbpn@isolation.net), November 23, 2001.


In 1996 Ilford told me, in a phone conversation about the quantity required to develop sheet film, that 2.5ml of Ilfosol-S concentrate was required to develop one square inch of 100 Delta. They recommended that I use 3 ml/sq inch for safety. I have been doing so with no problems. I recently called Ilford and asked the same question about DDX and could not get an answer.

-- Dick Silven (rms@acadia.net), December 23, 2001.

Are you sure those numbers are correct? 3mL/sq. inch of concentrate would mean 240mL of concentrate for a single 36 exp. roll. That would mean that you couldn't even develop a single roll of film in a double-roll tank with 1+9 dilution. What's more, you could only develop two rolls per 500mL bottle of concentrate.

My experience has shown me that 15mL of concentrate per roll is enough. But then again, I'm just scanning and I've *never* printed this stuff via analog means so perhaps the film isn't so hot when printing the old-fashioned way. However, when developing at 30mL/roll and 15mL/roll with the same concentration, I get the same results for a given emultion (at least, by looking at the negs through a 4x loupe).

Regardless, 3mL/sq. inch seems a bit much for this developer unless you define concentrate as 1+9 or 1+14 dilution.

-- Nicholas Barry (nbpn@isolation.net), December 23, 2001.



I'm an idiot. That should be emulsion, not emultion.

-- Nicholas Barry (nbpn@isolation.net), December 23, 2001.

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