[Shawn Dougherty]

HI Shawn:

I have been experimenting a bit in that I have developed negatives to print on both the Lodima grades. Thus far I have not seen problems with either grade, but the number of prints made is not sufficient to draw firm conclusions. No issues either with the "trial run". I believe I will most likely proceed as you intend, i.e., develop negatives to print on the Grade 3, with water bath development and the Grade 2 "held in reserve" as necessary.

I have ordered the Fomalux. Will not have the chance to use it for at least several weeks ( at least a week go get here )...but I will try to print the same negative on both grades of Lodima AND the Fomalux FB, and report to the thread. Unfortunately, I have no scanner-and no current plans to buy one!

With the Fomalux RC and the FB one might have a way to "proof" one's negatives at a very significant savings. The print exposure is apparently quite different, but at least one can use a NaCl paper and Amidol.

Thanks for the info! Looking forward to hearing what you think of the Fomalux.

I gave this paper an informal test today. I had some contrasty (overdeveloped) 5x7 negatives on TMY that I tried to contact print on the pre-production run of Lodima (adjusted grade 3) and thought that perhaps the new Fomalux 111 at grade 2 would offer a better (softer) print. In comparing the tonality, the Fomalux 111 grade 2 had slightly more contrast that the pre-production Lodima grade 3. As Shawn noted, the Fomalux 111 paper is much faster than Lodima. I put the contact printing gear away and thought I would try some projection prints to see if the faster speed of the Fomalux 111 would allow this. I pulled some 120 TMY-2 negatives developed (in Pyrocat-HD) for standard grade 2 paper and adjusted my 23C enlarger (using a dichroic head and diffusion chamber) to allow a 7" x 7" print on a Saunders easel. I used a Nikon 80mm 5.6 lens and stopped it down to 8.0. My times were in the 120 to 150 second range. Having used Foma papers before, I was used to some slow exposure times, so this was not a problem. The resulting prints appeared to be in a range between a conventional grade 2 and grade 3 paper. For the processing, I used Ilford WT developer, which produced a slightly warm olive tone. The tonality is beautiful and I am very happy with the prints. I plan to try this paper in Amidol and Ansco 130 to see how it performs. Looking forward to more user comments.

You're a patient man! Good to know it works with an enlarger. Of course at those times I'd think you'd be running into reciprocity failure and burning would become quite tedious.

Interesting your Ilford Warm Tone developer gave a slightly warm olive tone... I'd say my modified MAS brew gave a slightly olive warm tone.