Ferrania P30 and Perceptol

I’d like to share my experiences developing P30 from Film Ferrania in Ilford’s Perceptol developer. I attempted to post this information to their developer’s forum, but my post was flagged spam and nobody over there seems to be monitoring the spam queue and as such, my post never made it.

So here you go internet 🙂 Some of the names and times won’t make sense as this was intended to be a forum post, but ultimately, I think this should be good data for anyone working with Ferrania P30 and Ilford Perceptol.

I’ve worked on figuring out the numbers for Perceptol 1:3 and wanted to share my methodology for getting to these numbers and my first results. Any time that I’m working with a b/w film that doesn’t have information on the Massive Dev Chart, I tend to look at the chart to see what’s similar. In the case of P30, Ferrania has given us the chart and the numbers on that chart match relatively closely to Rollei Retro Pan 80S on the Massive Dev chart for a handful of developers. Given that, the numbers for Rollei Retro Pan 80S are likely close and for Perceptol 1:3, the number is 18 minutes at 20C.

Not too long ago, Ludi gave us a Perceptol Stock number of 9 minutes and Ludi’s results look quite nice. I then looked on the Massive Dev chart to get a better understanding of the relationship of Perceptol stock to Perceptol 1:1 to Perceptol 1:3 as it behaves across a wide variety of films. In general, the ratio between stock and 1:1 falls between 1.16 and 1.85, but usually around 1.44. The ratio between 1:1 and 1:3 falls between 1.26 and 1.58, but usually around 1.4 as well.

Toni Skokovic gave us a number for Perceptol 1:1 of 20 minutes, but if we accept Ludi’s 9 as the right time for stock, then Toni’s 1:1 number has a ratio of 2.22, which is generally higher than the range I was finding across a variety of films on Massive Dev. At this time, I think Toni’s number for 1:1 may be a little long, but more testing is definitely needed to confirm that.

Looking further at the chart, I found Ilford Pan 100 shot at ISO 50 seems to be a good match ratio-wise in that for stock it’s 8 minutes, 1:1 it’s 12 minutes, and 1:3 it’s 16 minutes. The ratios here are 1.5 and 1.3333. If we take Ludi’s 9 and multiply by the ratios, we get 9 minutes for stock, 13.5 minutes for 1:1, and 18 minutes for 1:3 (which matches my original guess based on Rollei Retro Pan 80S) All at 20C.

Given the above, I did the following:

Tank -> Paterson 3 reel
Developer-> Perceptol 1:3 (18 minutes at 20C formula, measured temp of 20.1C for an actual time of 17:51)
Agitation-> Continuous first minute, 10 seconds once every minute afterwards.
Stop Bath-> Ilford Wash Method
Fix->Ilford Rapid Fixer 1+4 for 5 minutes
Wash->Ilford Method for 7 minutes
Rinse->Kodak Photo-Flo added to tank and continue with the Ilford Method for the remaining 3 minutes.
Scanned->Epson V700 at 3200dpi with Silverfast

Results from Minolta CLE, Minolta Rokkor 40mm f/2 and Zeiss Biogon 28mm f/2.8 — All shot at ISO 80.