I had to keep myself out of mischief but inspiration was MIA, so here's yet another film/developer test.(posted 8172 days ago)The test was simply "which shows finer detail, Acros or TMX in Rodinal 1:100 w/ascorbate or Beutler 105?"
I used 35mm for the test, and the target was a sticker on an air-conditioner compressor (not running of course) around 25 feet away. The test camera was carefully focused, and the apertures used were halfway between f4 and f5.6 to f5.6 to accomodate the slightly different film speeds. I did all the usual stuff for high-resolution photography but didn't go to extremes, but I'm satisfied that the film and/or developer was the main factor in the image-quality chain.
The little sticker itself has lines of type across it in varying sizes.
Anyway....no significant differences were observed between the films developed in Rodinal 1:100 w/ascorbate and the classic high-definition developer Beutler 105.
For TMX at 30x I could make out lettering in the lines of type and felt that with more magnfication I could probably read them, while in the Acros negs I could see only jaggedy lines that were apparently type but I wouldn't have been able to say for certain whether the original was lines of type of just jaggedy lines. There was no feeling that more magnification would've helped.
So it appears that TMX wins this round.
The two TMX strips were interesting; sometimes a frame from Rodinal was sharper and sometimes a frame from 105 was sharper. I think what caused the variations was either the film slopping around in its channel, the vibrations that occur no matter how vibration-free the camera and its mount are, or both.
This is of course extreme nit-picking. For an encore I'm going to inspect pinheads for angels.
Actually there was a point; I wanted to see if there was any good reason to buy Acros in Quickloads at roughly three times the price of TMX in Readyloads. So far I don't see any reason at all to use it rather than TMX.