Tri-X at 800 in HC-110 - advice?

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knstflx

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I'm looking for recommended dilution and developing times for tri-x shot at 800 developed in hc-110. I've done a search and have found a variety of opinions so I'm hoping someone can convince me. I've only developed a handful of rolls at home (with several mishaps) so I'd like something simple.

I'd like to use dilution H if possible but found drastically different advice when I searched. Someone said this:

Tri-x 400 @800: Dilution 1/64 20C 17min, agitation; 3 inversion every 2 min.

Someone else said 20C 12 mins. Maybe it doesn't make that big a difference?
 
I tried this a little while ago using the recommendations from the Massive Dev Chart and it worked out perfectly.

Presoak for 3 minutes
10 minutes in Dilution E
23C
4 inversions every 30 seconds

The results, if the negative is properly exposed, are almost indistinguishable from shooting at 400 and developing with Dilution H. Acceptable grain (for Tri-X) and very sharp. No major loss of detail in either the highlights or shadows.

This is the only example I have at the moment of this film and development combo, but you can see the grain is good, and there is plenty of separation in the tones from almost full black (the glasses) to white (the out of focus lights in the background), and there's lots of detail in all the tones everywhere in between.

4613801675_ccd922d759_b.jpg
 
that looks pretty good. maybe i'll give that a try. presoak in tap water? is that an important step? i'm a novice here...
 
I recommend dilution H as well. I'd go for 12 minutes @ 20C. One inversion each minute.

Assuming normally lit scenes and the tolerance of Tri-X your negatives will be fine. If you need more shadow detail at the expense of highlights detail, extend this time by 2 minutes.
 
well, i probably should have listened to your advice but i ended up doing something different. it's just that my tap water was 75F and i was doing two rolls so mixing 630 ml water with 10 ml hc-110 was so easy. so i followed this guy's advice because he had that same combo of temp and dilution:
http://www.mironchuk.com/hc-110.html

he recommends 12.5 mins in dilution H at 75F, minimal agitation. i agitated not too much but probably more than him so i did a little under 12 mins. anyways, they turned out okay but pretty grainy. i'll post one.
l
 
4731344309_2fa43a7920_b.jpg


the others are actually grainier than this one but you get the idea. low light, lens wide open. but even the ones outside in the bright light were grainy.
 
that definitely was the best of the lot. and i don't mind that grain at all actually. here's more of the intense grain i was talking about. i'm just wondering what i would change about my developing process to get a finer grain, if it's possible.

like if i was working with dilution h, at 75F, would i shorten the time? do even less agitation? or should i change those factors as well? i think for the time being i'm going to stick with hc-110 since i am just getting started learning this and would like to get comfortable with it first.

4733078015_ac9fc11c34_b.jpg
 
Hi,

Agitation is :

Initial 10 inversions in 30 seconds
Subsequent 2 inversions every 30 seconds

The temp is 20c for the above.

I try to be consistent across my development, while kodak recommends every 30 sec agitate for 5 seconds, I choose 2 inversions ie. 6 seconds.
 
benlees said:
I shot a lot of Tri-X (120) at 800 with HC-110 dilution H last summer. 20c and 11 minutes turned out well.
Click to expand...


45 secs to start then 8-10 seconds every minute, in general. I am not the most diligent person in terms of being step-by-step accurate all the time. One of the reasons I prefer Tri-X.🙂
 
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