P3D Re: emulsion gremlins

["Greg Wageman" <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Dr. George A. Themelis <DrT-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


>My experience has been the Kodachrome is more prone to static
>electricity and tends to attract dust that is difficult to clean.
>More than E6 slides.  Bluish lines across the image and pinholes
>are also common in Kodachrome.  I assume that these are caused
>by the film processor.  I have seen junk in emuslion in E6.
>I tend to believe that some of that (all?) is caused by the
>lab using not sufficiently clean chemicals.


Well, sort of.  Until the introduction of the new Kodachrome processors,
all 14 of the domestic K-14 labs used the same machine.  This machine is
a continuous-feed processor, which requires that each roll be spliced on
to the end of the previous one.  This has traditionally been done with a
cloth-reinforced adhesive tape.  By the time this tape goes through the
several chemical baths (at higher-than-room-temperature), it becomes
very brittle, and produces large quantities of dust and debris.  If you
get your Kodachrome film developed but not cut nor mounted, they
conveniently package some of this debris in the sleeve with the film,
which inevitably leads to scratches, streaks and embedded particles (the
emulsion is still soft when it comes out of the processor). :-(

Hopefully, the new machines may improve this situation a bit...
Hopefully.

     -Greg W. (gjw@xxxxxxxxxx)



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