Poly-Toner

From Silvergrain Labs

There used to be two commercial toner products incorporating both polysulfide and selenium as the toning agent. They were (old) Agfa Viradon and Kodak Poly-Toner. New Agfa Viradon is a straight polysulfide toner similar to Kodak Brown Toner and these two products lack selenium component.

These toners produced very archival image with variety of image hues, from black brown, warm brown, purplish brown, orange brown, yellow brown to pinkish brown, depending on the paper, print developer and processing techniques. They were wonderful products, but both of these products are discontinued in or around 2000.

For general information, see toning.

Advantages of using both selenium and polysulfide in a single solution are:

1. faster toning than polysulfide alone
2. there is no need to warm the toning solution
3. wider range of toning effects
4. highly archival image

Kodak CIS-268

Kodak published Kodak CIS-268 (pdf) to describe how end users can mix a toner very similar to Poly-Toner.

In this publication, one quart of Kodak Brown Toner is mixed with 5.4g of selenium powder, with minor pH adjustment with sodium carbonate and sodium hydroxide. Converting these numbers and the unofficial formula for Kodak Brown Toner that a Kodak engineer told an IPI scientist, the formula becomes:

Kodak CIS-268 (abbreviated formula)
Liver of sulfur	245g
selenium (elemental)	5.7g
sodium hydroxide	q.s.
sodium carbonate	q.s.
water to make	1.0 l

At the 1+24 dilution, one liter of the working solution contains 10g liver of sulfur and 0.23g selenium. This is pretty much what I found empirically, based on my experience with Poly Toner.

This amount of selenium is pretty much the maximum one can go without causing selenium to precipitate. Precipitated selenium stains prints very badly, and therefore it is best to use small amount of selenium and replenish the toner with a small amount of selenium from time to time. Of course, the toner working solution should be filtered to remove any black precipitate.