As the sub heading implies, I was a little surprised after developing this roll of Rollei RPX 25 in a fresh batch of Cinestill Df96 monobath. It's been a while, but my delight at the tonal qualities of these negatives (for me, the right balance of contrast and smooth tonality) reminded me of the first time I developed a slow speed film in Cinestill. I was impressed then and still am.
It really is a very nice developer, even disregarding the added convenience of it being a monobath. In addition, Df96 works well at a wide range of temperatures.
My only sort of complaint, strange as it sounds, is that this is an especially schmutzy developer. If you don't wash your negatives really well and wipe them down thoroughly, you're (or at least I am) going to get gunk on the negatives. I washed this batch pretty darn well and I thought I did a good job of wiping them down with Pec-pads, but a couple of the negs were still slightly gunky. Filtering the developer doesn't seem to help at all. It seems to be something that happens in situ.
As you can imagine, these were taken during a walk around my neighborhood with my old Leica Ic and Voigtlander 12mm.
Oh, the one more unusual looking shot was the result of pulling the negative from the scanner too soon.
