Herve,
I am reading this post yet I cannot reply to it because I don?t know what you want me to say.
I cannot help you without having your films, your camera and your developing tank on my desk to look at.
Besides you have not even given us an emulsion number up to this point.
It has been no secret that CHS emulsions are more scratch sensitive than other films and it cannot be changed as it is a chrakteristik of the emulsion. If you put hardener in this type of emulsion the base fogg increases by about 50% and the speed falls down to 30%. Obviously we don?t want this to happen.
Photographers have used it since 1952 like this and managed to cope with the problem.
I cannot tell you what is causing the problem in your camera from here, Herve.
And yes, ofcourse the chance exist that the film got scratched during manufacturing.
Any product produced in rolls can possibly bear this risk. We try to avoid this as much as we can during manufacturing but with the mass market colapsing we have to work around all the problem arising from winding films by hand the best we can.
The test is simple. Sacrifice one roll. Pull it out and look at it. No need to develop.
If you see scratches send them back to us for inspection and replacement.
I myself just shot 40 rolls last sunday in a NIKON F4 with automatic rewind and no scratches.
However I found them in my fridge, lefover from a shooting in the summer and they might have hardened a bit meanwhile.
It is true that the cassetes used are different from Ilford?s. Ilford has been (and might be able for a few more months if they have stock) Agfa cassettes. They no longer exist which is a shame as they were the best cassetes made for the free market.
We planed to switch to these cassetes in 2004 but then unfortunately Tura went bankrupt and we had to change plans.
Now there are two more sources left on the world market for casettes if you can?t make your own cassettes like Fuji and Kodak do. Both sources make a slightly worse quality than Agfa used to. We use them both and will be using only one for the future (not the one the films come in currently). The problem with these new casettes is that:
1) they cost a fortune making every film more expensive by 35 cents
2) they spring open if you drop the film on the floor
3) they can only be loaded by hand
However we hope that the loading by hand, which goes slower, will minimnise the risk of scratching the film during confectioning.
Roland,
ofcourse they are not !
No film in this world is as good as it was 5 or 10 or even 20 years before !
I have said this now over and over again and I will repeat once more for you:
The QUALITY of films is a direct factor of the QUANTITY produced OR of the PRICE for one roll.
I is very simple mathematics. To meet a certain quality you have to prepare every coating with hundreds of thousands of EUR.
There are thousands of organic ingredients in an emulsion and every one can cause a mess. If you want perfect quality you need to test for every one of them.
This is impossible so usually you test for about 50-100 events maximum. This gets the film into a narrow enough window of charakteristiks.
If you want to achieve this standard these tests cost you aproximately 50 000 EUR to 120 000 EUR per emulsion run.
If you make one million sqm this amounts to 0,007 EUR per film.
We produce of the CHS films about 5 000 sqm per year for the whole world?s demand.
Distribute these costs and you will se: impossible to do.
But we are lucky because the CHS emulsion is very simple so it does not need so much testing and it is still quite good. So we run tests at a level which is a compromise between price per roll and quality since 2002 when the market collapsed and try to keep the quality like it is.
Most customer are very pleased with the products and the quality. A few who have been using these films since the 1960ies, like you, see a small difference and are unpleased but there is absolutely nothing we can do about this if the market stays at this level of sales.
And it is not a matter of 1 EUR per roll more or less. We are talking 100 EUR per roll if you want the exact same quality like in the 90ies. No one will pay this.
But to work around this is actually very simple. Test your process for every new emulsion number and adjust your exposure and developing times and there you are always at 100%.
Machines: Coating yes, confectioning: no (lucky we are that we don?t use confectioning machines from the 60ies!).
Mirko
(Dieser Beitrag wurde zuletzt bearbeitet: 18-02-2006, 02:21 PM von Mirko Boeddecker.)
I am reading this post yet I cannot reply to it because I don?t know what you want me to say.
I cannot help you without having your films, your camera and your developing tank on my desk to look at.
Besides you have not even given us an emulsion number up to this point.
It has been no secret that CHS emulsions are more scratch sensitive than other films and it cannot be changed as it is a chrakteristik of the emulsion. If you put hardener in this type of emulsion the base fogg increases by about 50% and the speed falls down to 30%. Obviously we don?t want this to happen.
Photographers have used it since 1952 like this and managed to cope with the problem.
I cannot tell you what is causing the problem in your camera from here, Herve.
And yes, ofcourse the chance exist that the film got scratched during manufacturing.
Any product produced in rolls can possibly bear this risk. We try to avoid this as much as we can during manufacturing but with the mass market colapsing we have to work around all the problem arising from winding films by hand the best we can.
The test is simple. Sacrifice one roll. Pull it out and look at it. No need to develop.
If you see scratches send them back to us for inspection and replacement.
I myself just shot 40 rolls last sunday in a NIKON F4 with automatic rewind and no scratches.
However I found them in my fridge, lefover from a shooting in the summer and they might have hardened a bit meanwhile.
It is true that the cassetes used are different from Ilford?s. Ilford has been (and might be able for a few more months if they have stock) Agfa cassettes. They no longer exist which is a shame as they were the best cassetes made for the free market.
We planed to switch to these cassetes in 2004 but then unfortunately Tura went bankrupt and we had to change plans.
Now there are two more sources left on the world market for casettes if you can?t make your own cassettes like Fuji and Kodak do. Both sources make a slightly worse quality than Agfa used to. We use them both and will be using only one for the future (not the one the films come in currently). The problem with these new casettes is that:
1) they cost a fortune making every film more expensive by 35 cents
2) they spring open if you drop the film on the floor
3) they can only be loaded by hand
However we hope that the loading by hand, which goes slower, will minimnise the risk of scratching the film during confectioning.
Roland,
ofcourse they are not !
No film in this world is as good as it was 5 or 10 or even 20 years before !
I have said this now over and over again and I will repeat once more for you:
The QUALITY of films is a direct factor of the QUANTITY produced OR of the PRICE for one roll.
I is very simple mathematics. To meet a certain quality you have to prepare every coating with hundreds of thousands of EUR.
There are thousands of organic ingredients in an emulsion and every one can cause a mess. If you want perfect quality you need to test for every one of them.
This is impossible so usually you test for about 50-100 events maximum. This gets the film into a narrow enough window of charakteristiks.
If you want to achieve this standard these tests cost you aproximately 50 000 EUR to 120 000 EUR per emulsion run.
If you make one million sqm this amounts to 0,007 EUR per film.
We produce of the CHS films about 5 000 sqm per year for the whole world?s demand.
Distribute these costs and you will se: impossible to do.
But we are lucky because the CHS emulsion is very simple so it does not need so much testing and it is still quite good. So we run tests at a level which is a compromise between price per roll and quality since 2002 when the market collapsed and try to keep the quality like it is.
Most customer are very pleased with the products and the quality. A few who have been using these films since the 1960ies, like you, see a small difference and are unpleased but there is absolutely nothing we can do about this if the market stays at this level of sales.
And it is not a matter of 1 EUR per roll more or less. We are talking 100 EUR per roll if you want the exact same quality like in the 90ies. No one will pay this.
But to work around this is actually very simple. Test your process for every new emulsion number and adjust your exposure and developing times and there you are always at 100%.
Machines: Coating yes, confectioning: no (lucky we are that we don?t use confectioning machines from the 60ies!).
Mirko
