Kodak High Speed Infrared in X-Tol

I still have quite a bit of Kodak High Speed Infrared in 4" x 5" sheet format, in my freezer.  This film was discontinued in the late 1990's and all of my stock reached it's "Best Before" date in 2000 or 2001.  I've kept it frozen and continue to shoot with it.  In the past I have mostly processed it in Kodak T-Max Developer, diluted 1:6.  This is slightly more dilute than the normal 1:4 dilution called for by Kodak.  I have been pretty happy with the results, but always had some issues with uneven development, fingerprints, dust spots, etc.

In recent months I've been shooting some duplicate shots so that I could attempt to process some in X-Tol, and then compare to the T-Max.  I was hoping to eliminate the issues that I have been having with uneven development, and also find a developer that is a little more economical and forgiving.  On May 20th I processed a batch of 11 sheets of film in Kodak X-Tol developer, diluted 1:1, for 10:45 minutes at 24C.  When I compared this to identical negatives processed in T-Max by my usual routine I found that these X-Tol negatives were a little too dense.  More importantly I found that these negatives suffered from uneven development, mottling, spotting and fingerprints to an even greater degree than what I had experienced with T-Max.

I have a finite supply of this film left.  This little experiment taught me that there is no point wasting it on testing and experimentation.  I need to continue to process in T-Max, which has afforded me generally good results.  I will still continue to lose a few images to fingerprints, dust spots and minor development issues, but probably to a lesser degree than what I have expereinced with the alternative.  Here are some scans of a few of the images that came out of this batch.  The compositions are generally OK, but virtually all of then exhibit some sort of development issues, at least to a minor degree...