White Powder on Expired Fuji Super HQ 200

[CreakyTiki]

Hello!

I purchased some ~10 year expired Fuji Super HQ 200 recently (said to be cold stored) and the rolls in the two boxes I opened have a white powdery residue on the film where it bends near the lip of the cassette, as well as small amounts on the edges around the cut leader end and varying traces on the top and bottom of the cassette. It seems to possibly be only on the parts which touched the plastic canister, and wipes off easily.

Going to shoot a test roll today and see if there are any problems.

Any idea what this might be? Thanks!

 

[CreakyTiki]

Given the way that the Fuji canisters hold the cassette in place yet allow for a small amount of shaking, I wonder if the powder is the result of friction against the canister. Is it perhaps plastic dust? That wouldn't be something to worry much about, but I'm still a bit concerned that it's something chemical (reaction, poor storage/decay, etc.)

 

[MattKing]

I don't want to alarm you, but white powder in 35mm film canisters sounds an awful lot like they were once in the hands of some of the people I was slightly acquainted with when I was in university in the 1970s.

A small anecdote: The Kodak lab in North Vancouver, BC used to receive huge quantities of mailed Kodachrome and Ektachrome for processing. On a reasonably regular basis, some bright individual would get the idea to mail themselves a film canister filled with contraband, using the Kodak mailing envelopes. Little did they know that the post office would never read the addresses on those envelopes - they would just send them to the Kodak lab.

So the women (and they all were women) who spent their days opening those canisters in absolute darkness would get spooked when they discovered something other than film.

The RCMP drug squad would be called, and they would switch the drugs with something safe, and then send the package on to the address, keeping a watchful eye.

You may wonder why the canisters were opened in darkness. It was because it was also a reasonably regular occurrence that some other bright individual would have trouble with their camera, have the film removed, and send it to Kodak without the accompanying 35mm cassette. If by some miracle it wasn't completely fogged when it went into the canister, Kodak would get something out of it when it was developed.

 

[CreakyTiki]

Funny you should say that because one of the first thoughts that popped into my head when I saw the powder was that I would have to wipe it off of all the rolls I'll be taking on a trip soon to Mexico with me, lest some customs agent think it's a remnant of something being smuggled inside. I got a little paranoid for awhile that someone would soon be coming to collect their contraband until I realized that it was quite silly because, among a sea of other reasons, an eBay seller doesn't have much control over who buys their product. That, and despite the fact that these are fairly worn boxes of film, the flaps on the sides were quite crisp and I'm sure factory sealed.

I'm too young to remember much of film's heyday, but the more I hear about Kodak's operations in the past, the more nostalgic I feel for a time I never experienced when consumer labs put that level of care into their work.

...and when Super 8 film and processing didn't cost a fortune...

 

[CreakyTiki]

*shrug* It's cheaper, with the airlines having cut-rate flights to the Mayan, all the food and booze included (and you can be sure we'll be sitting at the pool bar or on the beach most of the time), and with the Canadian dollar as crappy as it is right now it's pretty pricey to go to the U.S. and Europe.

Plus my wife's parents are paying for the family to go, so I can't look a gift horse in the mouth!