Re: Viscous Developers

From: Sandy King <sanking@CLEMSON.EDU>
Subject: Viscous Developers
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 09:25:37 -0500

> I have heard people mention viscous developers as a way to increase
> edge effects without reducing agitation.
>
> Can anyone suggest some literature on this or give me some direction
> on how I might adapt an existing developer to use this way?

As far as I know, there are few publications describing viscous
developers in relation to increased adjacency effects. None I know is
more than a passing statement of a couple of sentences long. I think I
saw one such in Carroll, Higgins and James's textbook. If you read
something I mentioned before, those are results of my experiments. It
is impractical with roll films in spiral reels, but may work much
better with dry plates. You can thicken DS-10 1+1, DS-12, Agfa 17,
D-96, etc. and add a suitable amount of thickening agent such as
hydroxymethylcellulose.

Another area where viscous developer is used is motion picture
soundtrack development. Viscous developer is applied to the film by
the applicator. The film is allowed to travel for a certain distance
at a certain speed, determining the development time, and follow the
rest of the processing. Those developers contain a lot of hydroquinone
to reduce edge effect, which is undesirable for soundtrack recording.
You may be able to find something about thickening agent they use, but
the formula is not very useful for still image development.

Because viscous developer used one shot is wasteful, I don't think it
was not used in commercial scale besides the soundtrack development.

Let me know if you find anything describing any detail in print.

--
Ryuji Suzuki
"Well, believing is all right, just don't let the wrong people know
what it's all about." (Bob Dylan, Need a Woman, 1982)