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Phil,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful and informative reply.
I get it: if we are consistently making negatives that readily yield the prints we had envisioned, that is all the validation of our objective testing that we require.
Two notes from personal experience:
1. I quite take Phil's point that "operator error" at the metering stage is likely to be the biggest source of problems once we have determined our EFS and developing times. I have been doing some comparitive metering, zone and incident, and have been dismayed by how infrequently I get results from the two systems that closely agree. Apparently I have a tendency when spot metering to pick unnecessarily dark areas for my low value.
2. I recently set up a new darkroom, and in the process changed from a condenser enlarger to a dichro color head, and from hand-inverting jobo 4X5 tanks to BTZS tubes. I wanted to get comfortable with tube development before running my new film tests, so I simply plugged a new ES value of 1 into my expo-dev program, and for film speed and developing times took Phil's data on HP5+ in DD-X from the Library of Film Curves edition of the D Max news letter. The result? My new negatives are printing beautifully at a setting of 0 Y, 5 M, right where I had hoped they would be. In fact, my results are so good that I wouldn't even bother with new film tests, except that I would like to extend the Gbar range down to .3 or so, and will need a higher developer dilution to do that.
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