The Lomo daylight film tank

I bought one of these even though I don’t really need it. Here’s what I liked and the problem I had with it.

I don’t need a daylight-loadable tank. I have a changing bag and soon will have a light-proof darkroom again. But I made the mistake of watching Civil war¹, and now I kind of want to be able to process film in whatever burnt-out shell of civilisation is left after the coming wars. Of course I’ll be one of the first victims of those wars and I’m not that kind of photographer anyway. But never mind that: I bought one anyway.

The first impression is that it’s well-made but inevitably a bit fiddly to assemble and load. There are more bits to it than any tank I’ve used for roll film: that’s reasonable because it does things those tanks don’t. The film leader retriever is something you need to master (nobody taking more than one roll of film who cares about not accidentally double-exposing rolls leaves leaders out), but it’s not that hard. Loading film into the tank is fairly straightforward, although I still do it based on the instructions. You want to be very careful to keep the central film-can-holder bit away from the chemistry.

The big obvious, unavoidable, downsides are that it’s a single-roll tank and not that economical on chemistry. Single-roll tanks mean processing lots of rolls takes many times longer, not only because it takes as long to process one as it does n, but also because you have to wait for the tank & spiral to dry. The Lomo tank comes with a second spiral but using it in a wet tank is asking for serious trouble. It uses 350ml of chemistry per roll, while my little 3M tanks use 250, and the Paterson 3-roll tanks use 900.

But those are problems it would be hard to avoid and which I expected. It is light-tight enough to load film under bright indoor lighting, at least. Given the number of moving parts and the rubber gasket (see below) I suspect it might go wrong or wear out more quickly than a simpler tank but, again, I don’t think that’s avoidable.

The one problem I hadn’t foreseen was the lid. The tank has a (very pretty) red lid which sits on top of it. There’s a hinged metal strap (I hope it is stainless) with a clip which you can use to hold it on. You don’t really need this even if you agitate by inversion if you remember to hold the lid on. The problem isn’t that the lid leaks — it doesn’t — it’s that is seals too well. There’s a rubber gasket under the lid which seals against the rest of the tank, and when it’s sealed the lid is fairly unwilling to come off. That’s good as it does not drool chemistry in the way some tanks do, but it’s also a problem: when you’re trying to change chemistry you need to be ready to work quite hard to get the lid off. And, worse, it’s hard to do this without spilling chemistry from the tank. That’s fine for developer (at least for me: I only use dev once), but for stop and fix you end up losing more than a little each time, which is wasteful. This might be something that I will get better at with practice.

In conclusion: if you are someone who doesn’t make darkroom prints but scans film, and you only use 35mm, then with this tank you could do without a changing bag at all, with the downsides being that you can only process one film at a time. The lid problem is a little annoying but that may be something I can learn to deal with. Th tank solves the problem it sets out to solve, and if that was a problem I had I’d buy it without a thought.