Liquid Chemistry
For Black and White Films and Prints
Q: Can I use Sprint’s STANDARD Film Developer to develop prints?
The short answer would be yes, with some SIGNIFICANT “buts” included.
Most film and paper developers are similar in that many use the same developing agents in them. Most often they use a combination of Metol and Hydroquinone or Phenodone and Hydroquinone. Sprint is in the latter category. Although we cannot discuss the exact formula of Sprint’s chemistry, if we look at published formulas for some common film and print developers, we can see that they are similar, but the proportion of Metol to Hydroquinone is different. The amount of developing agent is different too, so right at the start we would say that you would want to use the film developer at a higher concentration, say 1:4 or greater.
Please keep in mind that while you will get an image, you may not like the results. When developing prints, you generally want to get the maximum black that the paper can handle. That is what the extra hydroquinone in the formula is there for. With film, one generally wants less than it’s maximum density, as you are trying to compress the subject brightness range to match that of the materials, maximum film density would give you far too much contrast to be printable. So a print developed in film developer may not have a very strong black, and it may have a bit of a warm or green color cast as well depending on the paper.
If you are interested in experimenting, our advice would be to try it and see what you think, but don’t get too optimistic, and beware that the developer may not have a very long tray life compared to regular print developer.
And just FYI, As you may well know, it is fairly common to go the other direction and develop film in print developer, for situations where an energetic developer is called for, maybe in the name of speed (newspaper photographers used to do this to develop their film super-fast) or for greater contrast. People using plastic cameras like Dianas and Holgas may find that high energy development helps off-set the rather low contrast of plastic lenses.
Happy experimentation!
