Developer Types

Developers can be roughly divided into various categories such as fine-grain, low-contrast, acutance, high-contrast, etc. The term fine-grain is now in fact obsolescent. The advances in emulsion manufacture have been such that the use of special developer formulations to make the necessarily granular structure of the image less evident in the print is totally unnecessary. The slower films are truly fine-grained and 35 mm negatives can be enlarged a long way beyond the requirements of most users before any really obtrusive graininess becomes evident. The standard developer formulation for use with all types of black-and-white continuous tone films (as opposed to line, copying or graphic arts films) is the metal-hydroquinone (MQ) or Phenidone-hydroquinone (PQ) plus borax type, characterized by the now almost historic ID 11 from Il ford or D76 from Kodak. The used undiluted gives development times at 20° C of 6-9 minutes according to film speed. There are many closel related variations of the standard formula. A buffered version (example: increases the 2 g of borax to 8 g and adds 8 g of boric acid). The main advantage claimed for this version is that its activity is more constant throughout its life, whereas the basic version tends to increase in activity with standing. Most of these solutions necessitate prolonged development times and also incur the penalty of a reduction in effective film speed.