Rollei Rapidry

Maco in Germany is selling this peculiar chemistry called Rapidry. It claims to dry freshly developed film in 5min so that it is ready for enlarging or scanning, and supposedly makes the film antistatic. Drying film is a major pain for me, since I don't have any dust-free space and the shower is being used constantly. This Rapidry thing looks great to me, but I have some doubts. Maco says the following:

Pour the rinse water out of the developing tank.
Pour RAPIDRY into the developing tank, then close the tank.
Agitation: Invert the tank 3-4 x.
Pour the RAPIDRY solution back into the original RAPIDRY bottle.
Take the reels out of the tank immediately.
Affix the film clip to the film end.
Hang up the film and affix the film clip with counterweight at the other end of the film.
Hang up the film at a dry, dust free place.
If you want to use a film dryer / film drying cabinet please turn the heating off and use cold air.
The film drying process takes about 5 minutes, depending on humidity and temperature.
Afterwards the films are dry enough for further work like enlarging or scanning. Furthermore they are also antistatic and the emulsion is hardened.
RAPIDRY is usable as long as drying times are not significantly extended.

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Has anyone used this stuff? What is it exactly? Does it work as advertised, and more importantly, does it have any detrimental effects on the film? What about archival stability?

Any insight would be much appreciated.

There was a similar stuff named Drysonal from Tetenal. It was horribly expensive and it's not available any more.

Ingredients:
- Distilled water
- Alcohol
- Some antistatic wetting agent

5 min. is extremely optimistic

The basic idea is to have a fliud that mixes with water and has a high degree of evaporation. Inserting the washed, wet film into such fluid will cause a diffusion process in which the content of water in the film will be reduced and substituted by time with that fluid. Drying this film now will be faster due to hat high rate of evaporation.

Newspaper photo labs used this trick with plain alcohol

Vaughn said:

Newspaper photo labs used this trick with plain alcohol

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Or they printed em wet

I put a capful of isopropyl alcohol in my final rinse.

I have tried it, with less than good results. It dries the film fast, but when I used it, it left stains on the film. Plus, it has a horrible, formaldehyde like smell. I would think that isopropyl alcohol as suggested above would work as well or better. And probably cheaper as well.

cmo said:

There was a similar stuff named Drysonal from Tetenal. It was horribly expensive and it's not available any more.

Ingredients:
- Distilled water
- Alcohol
- Some antistatic wetting agent

5 min. is extremely optimistic

Click to expand...

I can just remember the my Dad trying out the Drysonal, around the 1970's or early 80's....there seemed no real advantage over air-drying for routine use.

IIRC, it couldn't be used with color films.

Bit of an old thread, but Google doesn't care.

I used Rapidry today for the first time. Bad experience.
After 5 min, my film was dry but crackled, as if it was dried in the oven. The surface was all bulged and it curled towards the emulsion side. I resisted the urge to rinse it again and waited a bit more. Half an hour later the film had straightened out and looked perfectly normal.
When I wanted to scan the negatives, I noticed these seemed to be a kind of greasy film on the non-emulsion side of the film. On top of that I found water spots (dry, but visible deposit) on both sides of the film.

The film seemed to scan perfectly and the water spots or grease have no visible impact. However, all of my negatives have streaks of very small black and white spots. They are not dust. The streaks might correspond to the area where I brushed the film (with an antistatic brush to remove dust). They might be the result from the grease I found on the film. Maybe this is a substance of Rapidry that has 'eaten' into the emulsion?

This negative is a good example (open the original 25Mpx version to see the black/white dots): http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/7269639842