Does anyone know these old sheet films? :-)

Hey fellow BW fans

I've stored these films for some time and want to fool around with them now.

Instead of wasting test material, I'd like to ask you for info and/or practical experience.

Worst case would be to waste some stripes for exposure and developement tests.

Thanks and best light to all of you!

The descriptions on the boxes give it away. These are film types used back in teh day in the graphic arts industry to make things like halftone screens etc. You'll find it challenging to get a continuous tone image from these, assuming they're not already fogged to oblivion in the first place. When trying to coax these into producing something resembling photographs, count on resorting to very slooooooooowwwww speeds (single digit ISO numbers, or lower) and probably requiring some kind of very gentle developer to try not to blow anything out (Google 'POTA developer' for instance).

I've google around for a while on these films, but couldn't find any useful info for processing them nowadays...

The POTA formula seems to be an easy and smart solution!

I've used Rodinal with a little MQ Borax at stand development for an old Fuji Super HR microfilm some years ago with satisfying results. Would that work here, too?

How do these films answer to benzotriazole solutions?

ADDING: The Wratten safelight series 3 should be green, right? Can I use the usual green filters here?

psykodaddy said:

I've used Rodinal with a little MQ Borax at stand development for an old Fuji Super HR microfilm some years ago with satisfying results. Would that work here, too?

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Maybe; you could try.

psykodaddy said:

How do these films answer to benzotriazole solutions?

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Same answer, I'm afraid...in principle should work, but the trick is to figure out how much you need to add. But I'd start without the BZT.

psykodaddy said:

The Wratten safelight series 3 should be green, right? Can I use the usual green filters here?

Click to expand...

The Kodak film is panchromatic, so your best bet would be to work in total darkness. Due to the (probably) slow speed of the material you may get away with a very (very) dim green light. Here's the filter curve for the #3 Wratten filter: https://www.kodak.com/content/products-brochures/Film/KODAK-Safelight-3-Dark-green.pdf

As you can see, it passes a tiny, tiny amount of light around 520nm. That's pretty close to a default 525nm green LED. You could use that, but you'd have to dim it waaaay down and only turn it on very briefly to inspect something you need to see.

I'd personally start with total darkness to not make any existing fog even worse.

Thanks for the filter curve @koraks !

If no one can share recent hands-on experience, I'd go with the POTA in total darkness and an exposure test, starting my wedges at 0.8 ISO

The good news is that you can determine a lot with very little film -- just 1/2" exposure strips.