Response to The Trouble With Xtol

What is your water source? Unless you are using deionized or distilled water, the water can vary in pH or introduce other variations into your mixed developer. The quality of your local tap water can change greatly from day to day, and this is my guess for what poisoned your XTOL. XTOL is buffered and includes agents to sequester potentially interfering ions from tap water, but still seems more sensitive to water purity than other developers I've used. However, when I use deionized water to mix XTOL, the stability has been far greater than the Kodak guidelines, and I've never experienced the developer failure you describe. Partially full stock bottles have been fine for several months (Kodak recommends only 1 month). My understanding is that Kodak fixed the packaging flaws with XTOL quite a while ago, although some old packages may still be out there. Good luck! Tim Nelson

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