RC Paper Longevity

Ciba/Ilfochrome is coated on a plastic support. It is not RC or FB.

Beware storing chromogenic prints and DB prints in the same folder. I have had some develop a strong acid odor and both types of prints begin to deteriorate. The Cibas turn brown and the chromogenic prints turn red.

PE

Wow. I didn't know that. I have some type R prints stored with some Cibas (on the old RC Pearl Ciba though, because it was half the price, not the glossy acetate stuff that was around longer) and some of the R prints are not doing so well. The Cibas are ok, though. And SOME of the 2203 prints are ok. I don't know for sure which were in closer proximity to the Cibas but they were all processed the same so I never had any clue why some of my 2203 prints looked fine all these years later and some don't.

Roger Cole said:

...on the old RC Pearl Ciba though, because it was half the price, not the glossy acetate stuff...

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Not directly relevant to this discussion, but glossy Cibachrome's base was polyester, not acetate.

Roger, smell the folder or container. Mine has a decided odor that it has taken on over the years. IDK what the cause is.

Ciba/Ilford has trouble being on any support but that white plastic. Seems that the bleach liked to eat the other types of support. The paper would go bad due to action of the strong (pH 0.5) acid. Not a good pH for anything AAMOF.

PE

Sal Santamaura said:

Not directly relevant to this discussion, but glossy Cibachrome's base was polyester, not acetate.

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Ah ok, thanks. The all plastic one anyway.

Photo Engineer said:

Roger, smell the folder or container. Mine has a decided odor that it has taken on over the years. IDK what the cause is.

Ciba/Ilford has trouble being on any support but that white plastic. Seems that the bleach liked to eat the other types of support. The paper would go bad due to action of the strong (pH 0.5) acid. Not a good pH for anything AAMOF.

PE

Click to expand...

I never had any problems with the RC pearl. I was poor - in high school and college - and it was about half the price of the glossy. Printing on it made it not that much more than type R so I changed to it for the ease of processing in comparison. If I'd had to use the glossy I'd have stayed with 2203.

But it's interesting that others apparently did. Well it did sort of fray or come apart at the edges a bit making borderless kind of impractical but I heard the glossy did that too, at least the early stuff.

Dear Roger & PE,

All my Ciba / Ilfochrome prints as good as the day they were made....but I never used the RC coated product only the GLOSS and Pearl on DuPont Melinex base, what CIBA was designed to coat onto.

We had a tag line in our advertising ' ILFORD make Images that last ' also in the USA we had the 200 year life tag for CIBA on Melinex.

Simon ILFORD Photo / HARMAN technology Limited :

Simon R Galley said:

All my Ciba / Ilfochrome prints as good as the day they were made....but I never used the RC coated product only the GLOSS and Pearl on DuPont Melinex base, what CIBA was designed to coat onto.

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I'm confused now. To my knowledge there never was Cibachrome on PE-coated paper, for reasons PE explained above.

Research? Yes, Ctein's Post Exposure, Advanced Techniques for the Photographic Printer. Second edition, Focal Press.
This book goes into all these issues with uncompromising technical analysis. Written by a physicist with over 30 years of printmaking experience, so expect the highest scientific standards. No serious analogue darkroom user should be without it. It's out of print but some copies seem to be available online. There should also be a free download from somewhere on the APUG site.


Sorry, this post got out of sync, I am new to posting on Apug and I was trying to reply to an earlier posting by fretiessdavis about finding a source of research on rc paper issues.

Simon R Galley said:

Dear Roger & PE,

All my Ciba / Ilfochrome prints as good as the day they were made....but I never used the RC coated product only the GLOSS and Pearl on DuPont Melinex base, what CIBA was designed to coat onto.

We had a tag line in our advertising ' ILFORD make Images that last ' also in the USA we had the 200 year life tag for CIBA on Melinex.

Simon ILFORD Photo / HARMAN technology Limited :

Click to expand...

My Cibas are good too, it's some of my Kodak Type 2203 R prints that are fading badly, while others are not, and they were all processed the same. I don't know what accounts for the difference, and was just musing, based on what PE said, if it could have to do with storage in proximity to the Ciba prints. It's no more than conjecture on my part though, and I'd never heard of this until now.

AgX said:

I'm confused now. To my knowledge there never was Cibachrome on PE-coated paper, for reasons PE explained above.

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Yes there was. I have prints I made on it. A quick google search turned up the following completed eBay auction where you can see photos of the labels calling it just that, RC:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20-SHEETS-4...D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

As I said, it was about half the price (well, maybe 60%) of the gloss stuff, which is why I used it back then.

Dear AGX

We made RC based product as a lower cost item for the CIBACHROME Colour Copier CC1217 and CC120machines, some was cut to sheet, not sure if the product went out into all markets though....its a long time ago !

Simon ILFORD Photo / HARMAN technology Limited :

Simon.

It was definitely sold by the usual darkroom supply places in the US. I think I bought mine from B&H.

I sometimes used RC Ciba paper for portrait commissions. I looked at my old reference album copies about a month ago, just for fun, and they look like they were printed yesterday, in contrast to the Ektacolor prints, which are already showing a bit of yellowing after only a couple decades. But I almost never used RC Ciba for framed work - just the glossy polyester product - with one exception, a test print hung in harsh direct mtn window light ... and even it lasted 25 yrs before any apparent fading. But intense projector halogen lighting in galleries could be far
worse than sunlight.

Roger Cole said:

It was definitely sold by the usual darkroom supply places in the US. I think I bought mine from B&H.

Click to expand...

This is right. It wasn't just for color copiers - the pearl-surface version sold for regular darkroom use was RC, not polyester as was the glossy version. Roger has already linked to a box of the stuff. Here's a data sheet from 1992:

http://www.21gradi.it/Public/Ilfochrome%20Classic%20Pearl%20Paper.pdf

Let me clarify to all.

Yes, Cibachrome was coated on RC support. IDK the sheet sizes available, but it was out there in cut sheet. At that time, we were informed that it was discontinued due to problems with separation of the RC at the edges due to destruction of the fiber paper in the sandwich structure of the RC. This seemed reasonable as our experience showed that coating DB materials on FB paper itself caused severe deterioration of the FB. Our own DB material was coated on a similar support to the "plastic" based Cibacrhome of that time. I have a small roll of it here in my lab. Just the support and not coated. Grant Haist found it in his darkroom and gave them to me not long ago.

As for fading.... The only thing I see with Cibachrome is not fading. It is the formation of brownish spots at random on the prints. And the only place it occurs is in the folder with Cibachrome, Type C and Type R prints. The C and R prints are getting red spots on them, and when you open the folder there is a faint odor that can be noticed. IDK the reason, but these were all properly processed.

PE

I just looked into my printed datasheets archive. I found it. Introduced in 1978. Cancelled in 2005.
Which means I knew about it.
Must be a severe kind of amnesia...


(It is well annoying to exploit ones dumb-posting allowance in early January already...)

Ciba RC was available almost until the end. I never had any issues with it, of any kind. It was hypothetically available even in big rolls, so someone somewhere must have used it that way. But it was nowhere near as popular as the deluxe glossy product. But either one had to be
used rather promptly after thaw or would develop crossover (typically beyond correction within 6 mo). I never particularly like the sorta stippled mat surface of the Pearl product. Probably the most beautiful color paper surface I have even seen was a bad batch of the polyester material where the gelatin weirdly dried to a luscious lustre less than its intended full gloss. They didn't either know how it happened or how to replicate it, but blamed it on bad gelatin. I was refunded - but that was not the point - I wanted more of it! I still have those prints, and they still look just as new as all the others. The demise of Ciba is eventually UV. They seem extremely stable in dark storage, unless mildew
get involved, which they as also susceptible to. But I never took a liking to RC black and white papers for personal use, just for quickie commercial projects intended for publishing or maybe bound portfolios for an architectural firms etc. I'm pretty much a fiber-base and drymount junkie.

Ciba RC was very prominent in the two labs I work at in the 80's , SCL imaging and BGM colour labs.
The paper came in 50 inch by 100 ft rolls, RC gloss, RC pearle, and the High Gloss polyester. I liked the pearl version of this paper.

I started a Ciba process of my own in the mid to late 90's which in the beginning was enlarger cut sheet only , but once I purchased a Lambda I used 30 inch High Gloss material, that I purchased in single grade rolls.

For enlarger work there was three grades to choose from in RC and High Gloss.
In combination with very complicated contrast reducing with highlight protection masks we made some pretty damm nice print, one show of 36 murals hung in the Smithsonian.

Once I purchased the Lambda machine we stuck with the top end product and its highest contrast material, because we could control the contrast via Photoshop.

I am sad to see this product go away, but the Swiss Group,,, not to be confused with the British Group,,, were very impossible to work with, and the crying was all but done by 2003.

There are still small pockets of printers who have stock left and are charging some pretty impressive rates to make prints.
Basically they were lucky to be in a position near the demise to stockpile hundreds of thousands of dollars of this product , and chemistry. I was not in this position and basically threw out a perfect running custom Cibachrome machine.