Glass plates from Ilford

I've read of Russian suppliers who still manufacture silver gelatine dry plates, but while trolling through the Ilford site, I discovered this:

http://ilford.com/html/us_english/prod_html/nuclear/LightExposure.html#Sect3

Haven't contacted them, so I don't know how much they cost. They cut them from a master plate, and will custom size per customer requirements, as per the FAQ.

K.

Ilford has a long history of providing specialized materials for scientific researchers. Since Kodak has almost left that market, Ilford may be about the only big company to still do this sort of semi-custom work for the scientific community. Ilford was the first company to develop effective thick emulsions for cosmic ray and high energy physics studies, and they always made the best ones. The L4 plates seem to be pretty specialized - blue sensitive and optimized for x-ray work. They are probably also pretty expensive. The Russians were isolated from western suppliers during the cold war, and I have no doubt that they developed a very good capability for themselves. I have also read that a small Russian or east European firm still makes plates for general photographic use. Unfortunately, I don't know who. At one time, not too long ago, Ilford coated FP-4 onto plates on special order. I don't know if they still do. Kodal supplied T-Max 100 on plates until a couple of years ago.

Slavich still makes photographic glass plates. Retro Photographic has a small stock left.

a box of 100 of the tmax 100 plates 10 years ago was between 400-500$ USD. on the alt process list a few years back people were buying/selling olde kodak plates to recoat &C. not sure exactly what came of it though, i couldn't afford them, and the shipping was a killer (glass is heavy!).

-john

Kobin said:

I've read of Russian suppliers who still manufacture silver gelatine dry plates, but while trolling through the Ilford site, I discovered this:

http://ilford.com/html/us_english/prod_html/nuclear/LightExposure.html#Sect3

Click to expand...

Not much use to us -- as they describe it, it's a monodispersed emulsion, basically like microfilm on glass instead of polyester or acetate. As such, you'd need a special developer like Technidol or POTA (or one of the other various low-contrast soups) to get pictorial results, typically at very low speed and with rather marginal tonality and range. As one who has shot a fair amount of microfilm (in subminiature cameras, it's one way to try to tame grain when 10x enlargement is just big enough to pass around), I can tell you monodispersed emulsion is not worth messing with if you have a choice.

Sure, it *might* be like Tech Pan on glass -- but more likely, it's nowhere near that good.