IR imagesetting film?

[MCB18]

Hi all! I have a friend that found a big roll of “IR Typesetting film” that is apparently from the 2000s, and when I looked into it, apparently Ultrafine still sells it! Does anyone have any experience with this stuff? Supposedly it’s made to work with 760 and 840nm lasers, which is very interesting. It’s probably very slow, and will need to be developed in a very low contrast dev, but would it be worth picking up a roll of it to experiment? It’s only like $150 for a 12“ x 100‘ roll I think…

 

[mshchem]

Strange sounding stuff. Might be exceptionally slow to visible light?? I wonder if it can be handled under safelight. Typesetting, I'm familiar with the old phototypesetters that would output from computer directly on lightweight photo paper (black lettering on white paper) .
I suppose this could be for burning litho plates?

 

[mshchem]

I doubt it'll respond anything like "regular"infrared film.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Hi all! I have a friend that found a big roll of “IR Typesetting film” that is apparently from the 2000s, and when I looked into it, apparently Ultrafine still sells it! Does anyone have any experience with this stuff? Supposedly it’s made to work with 760 and 840nm lasers, which is very interesting. It’s probably very slow, and will need to be developed in a very low contrast dev, but would it be worth picking up a roll of it to experiment? It’s only like $150 for a 12“ x 100‘ roll I think…

this is made for imagesetters and prepress work not regular photography, but it's perfect for making digital halftone negatives.

 

[koraks]

this is made for imagesetters and prepress work not regular photography, but it's perfect for making digital halftone negatives.

Precisely; using an appropriate digital laser exposure machine.
The film is generally very thin, and as said indeed very high contrast with very high dmax (4.0+ logD). It might be possible to coax something continuous tone from it with lots, lots of exposure. I doubt it'll produce any particularly good images.

 

[tykos]

i think Michael Strickland uses imagesetters printed negatives for his carbon transfers, you could ask him if he ever tried esposing the film with a camera

 

[koraks]

i think Michael Strickland uses imagesetters printed negatives for his carbon transfers, you could ask him if he ever tried esposing the film with a camera

He does; so do Calvin Grier, Katayoun Dowlatshahi and Todd Gangler. To the best of my knowledge all of them contract out the negative-making to a pre-press service. They send the files and receive the ready-made negatives. This is also how I've done it on occasion. My bet is that none of these people have ever had to handle the unprocessed material. I'm also not aware of any interest in Michael's behalf in this kind of photography; I doubt he still actively uses film in the first place.

Note also that imagesetter film is not always IR-sensitized; there's a couple of types to match with the different kinds of machines/exposure systems out there. Lasers of different wavelengths are used.