RE: Effect of Airport X-ray

[P3D Gregory J. Wageman <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Province writes:

>As I understand it, the X-Rays are not harmful to the film. According
>to what I've been told, it's the electrical and magnetic fields from
>the X-Ray machines that do the damage.

Uh, Mike, that advice applies to magnetic computer media, not film.
Photographic film is most definitely affected by X-rays.  The fogging
of film by X-rays was discovered in the last century.  X-ray imaging
of the human body has been done on photographic film for decades.
(Of course modern X-ray film emulsions are optimized for X-ray
sensitivity, but it wasn't always so.)

One thing I've observed about all of these anecdotal reports of taking
film through X-ray with "no problems", is that not one person has tried
the scientific approach of passing some film through, and having some of
the same type of film hand-inspected, then comparing the results.  (Ideally
both films would be shot using the same camera at the same time, or at
least identical cameras, but that's not practical except for the twin-
rig owners out there.  Any takers?)

When you've got nothing to compare against, how could you possibly notice
a minor loss of sharpness, or slight fogging, or fractional stop of
overexposure, etc.?  Sure, you'd notice gross effects (e.g. white outs),
but we all seem to agree that the affects aren't that gross, especially
for the slower films that we 3Ders tend to favor, and for U.S. X-ray
machines, which are generally acknowleged to be gentler than their
international counterparts.

Of course you can always adopt Dr. T's "don't worry" approach, but
personally I'd be VERY disappointed if all of my once-in-a-lifetime
vacation stereos were reduced in quality by avoidable exposure to
airport X-rays.  Key word here is "avoidable".

        -Greg W.


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