Radeka ANR Glass Neg Carrier Question

I've been eyeing Lynn Radeka's glass 4x5 negative carrier and noticed that he has versions with and without ANR glass. Here is a quote from his website (maskingkits.com):

These new Anti-Newton Ring carriers are made with special high quality single-side acid etched glass (both top piece and bottom piece), reducing or eliminating the possibility of Newton Rings. These upgraded carriers will yield beatiful, finely detailed crisp images without impairing the sharpness and smoothness of the image in any way, regardless of the degree of enlargement, and NO texture whatsoever will show on the print.
​

I've always been under the impression, and common sense supports this, that putting ANR glass under the negative would impact the image quality in the print. He does make the carrier available with clear glass on the bottom, but the 8x10 carrier only comes with ANR top and bottom. I am assuming that the etching of the glass is so fine that it doesn't impact image sharpness and no texture pattern shows up on the print.

I would be interested in hearing if anyone here has worked with the Radeka 4x5 carrier with ANR glass on the bottom and what their experience has been. I plan to use this mainly for medium and large (4x5) formats, but probably some 35mm as well. I've seen emulsion side Newton rings from TMax100, so the idea of an ANR bottom glass intrigues me.

Depends. True high-quality AN glass is not acid-etched like ordinary non-glare picture glass, but has a moulded wave-like pattern. So I routinely use it for both my contact masking frames and negative carriers, on BOTH sides of the emulsion. And my prints are as sharp as they get, clear up to 30x40 inch Cibachromes, which is the litmus test of print sharpness if ever there was one. The problem is, very high quality ANR glass is hard to get nowadays. Focal Point makes a reasonable quality version which should be fine; but I don't know what Radeka offers, so you'd have to ask. The other issue is the angle of incidence of the light source and ray convergence in the lens itself. You obviously want a diffuse enlarger head, and preferably longer than "normal lens", and a precisely leveled enlarger on every plane, so you can keep the depth of field shallow, focused only on the emulsion itself if possible. There are plenty of variables which take a bit of patience to sort out. That's why I replied, "Depends". I live in a foggy coastal climate where Newton Rings are a constant pest, especially
with modern thin-emulsion films which can be quite slick, even on the emulsion side.

I don't enlarge 8x10 as big as Drew (16x20 = 2x max for me) so AN glass on both sides of my Durst carrier is of no concern. When I enlarge Minox, I do use a plain glass below, because that might go up to 30x. 4x5" negative is somewhere in between those, so as Drew mentioned "Depends." For the record all my 4x5" glass carriers have plain glass below; that is how they came from Omega.

DREW WILEY said:

Depends. True high-quality AN glass is not acid-etched like ordinary non-glare picture glass, but has a moulded wave-like pattern.

...

You obviously want a diffuse enlarger head, and preferably longer than "normal lens", and a precisely leveled enlarger on every plane, so you can keep the depth of field shallow, focused only on the emulsion itself if possible.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply Drew. I use Focal Point ANR glass in my carriers which, according to their website are acid etched.

It seems like it would be impossible to focus on the film emulsion and not on the glass texture when the etched side of the bottom glass is in direct contact with the film emulsion. My enlargers are aligned and I use wide apertures, so I've never seen any glass texture in my prints, but that's with the texture on the top (non-emulsion) side of the film.

The degree of enlargement presumably plays a roll, so I'm glad to hear you haven't seen any problems even doing such large prints. That's encouraging.

ic-racer said:

I don't enlarge 8x10 as big as Drew (16x20 = 2x max for me) so AN glass on both sides of my Durst carrier is of no concern. When I enlarge Minox, I do use a plain glass below, because that might go up to 30x. 4x5" negative is somewhere in between those, so as Drew mentioned "Depends." For the record all my 4x5" glass carriers have plain glass below; that is how they came from Omega.

Click to expand...

I'm inclined to go with clear on the bottom, especially since I will be doing some smaller formats (6x6, 6x7, 35mm) and printing up to 16"x20" prints.

After digging into it further, I noticed that ortho lith film is getting hard to come by, especially in the 5x7 size recommended for the Radeka system. It would suck to spend $500 for the carrier only to have 5x7 lith film go out of production.

Thanks for your comments.

I have Focal Point glass on both sides of the neg for one of my big 8x10 color enlargers. No texture shows up in a color print at all. But
dye clouds interact with light rays somewhat differently than silver grain. So when I really boost contrast in VC black and white printing via a deep blue split-printing filter, for example, and am prone to use very high resolution lenses, I substitute a different kind of glass, either with special optical coatings or preferably a very special kind of AN glass with an irregular pattern. At one point in time I had samples of at least twenty different kinds of glass on hand, the best coming from Belgium. Durst supplied superb AN glass too. But now Focal Point seems to be it. But they are very cooperative folks to work with, and can supply their product in various thicknesses, cut to any size. Yet you can't drill the stuff to set in register pins, and do have to be careful about the angle of incidence in big enlargements.

DREW WILEY said:

I have Focal Point glass on both sides of the neg for one of my big 8x10 color enlargers. No texture shows up in a color print at all. But
dye clouds interact with light rays somewhat differently than silver grain. So when I really boost contrast in VC black and white printing via a deep blue split-printing filter, for example, and am prone to use very high resolution lenses, I substitute a different kind of glass, either with special optical coatings or preferably a very special kind of AN glass with an irregular pattern. At one point in time I had samples of at least twenty different kinds of glass on hand, the best coming from Belgium. Durst supplied superb AN glass too. But now Focal Point seems to be it. But they are very cooperative folks to work with, and can supply their product in various thicknesses, cut to any size. Yet you can't drill the stuff to set in register pins, and do have to be careful about the angle of incidence in big enlargements.

Click to expand...

I've not had any trouble with Focal Point ANR glass for the work I do, but have had trouble with Newton rings on the emulsion side of Tmax100 in my glass carrier (which doesn't ANR bottom glass). I certainly wouldn't mind having a solution for that, but I've always heard that ANR glass should be avoided in the bottom.

I too was a little concerned about availability of lith film. For the last couple years Ultrafineonline.com was the only source. I noticed the other day Freestyle has brought back Arista lith film, so maybe there's a resurgence!

I've gone with ANR on both top and bottom for all sizes up to 30"x40" from 4x5 and haven't noticed any image problems.

rwhawkins said:

I too was a little concerned about availability of lith film. For the last couple years Ultrafineonline.com was the only source. I noticed the other day Freestyle has brought back Arista lith film, so maybe there's a resurgence!

I've gone with ANR on both top and bottom for all sizes up to 30"x40" from 4x5 and haven't noticed any image problems.

Click to expand...

I am experimenting with Arista Otho Litho 3.0. I am getting pretty good results with Ansco 120 developer after trying various dilutions of LC-1B, HC-110, and Dektol. I noticed that the 5x7 version of the film that I got had tiny scratches along one side that looked like machine handling marks. I considered sending it back, but decided to rotate it 90 degrees and punch the registration holes in the scratched part of the film. I considered ordering some from Ultrafine to see if it has the same issue, but then the holidays happened.

I got ANR glass only on the top. That's what I'm used to using and feel comfortable with it.