tim_bradshaw1

<p>When thinking about the availability of film, I think the availability of thermionic valves (tubes to Americans) is a useful analogy.</p> <p>Valves became obsolete sometime in the early 1960s for most purposes. In 2014 I have five pieces of valve equipment that I use regularly, four of which are commercial products, of which three started production within the last ten years (and one within the last two). Yes, I am a guitarist, and four of the five pieces of equipment are guitar-related.</p> <p>Availability of replacement valves for these bits of equipment (including the old amp) is unproblematic: there are several manufacturers producing compatible valves. In about 2000 the valve-manufacturing industry was growing at 10% a year (I presume it no longer is, though it is probably still growing). There are probably thousands of products being currently manufactured – mostly guitar and hifi amps – which use valves.</p> <p>What <em>has</em> happened is that a lot of very specialised kinds of valves, such as the sets of valves used for portable radios and for other special applications, have gone away: if you have an old valve radio where the valve heaters are run in series across the mains you probably are out of luck when it dies. But even then, some oddities have survived: you can still get valve rectifiers, because some guitar amps use them.</p> <p>I see no reason why the same will not happen for film</p>

<p>Assuming you're in the US or (most of?) Europe I doubt air quality was significantly better in the 70s: it may well have been worse.</p> <p>This is probably some kind of plastic / rubber rot and if so there won't be much you can do I think. This kind of thing also often affects light seals and so on.</p>

<p>What Lex says is right: that's reticulation and it's a thermal-shock problem in processing.</p>

<p>I don't have an ME Super any more, but I have a couple of MXs which are probably mechanically similar. Both of them (or perhaps one twice) have suffered from this, and in both cases I took the camera to my local repair person and they fixed it. They've been fine since.</p> <p>That's not really helpful as it doesn't tell you what's wrong, but I think it is eminently fixable. I've never had the courage to take mine to bits (rather have someone who has done it before and knows what to look for do it) but it's probably doable if you are competent.</p>

<p>I suspect that this is condensation of some kind, and it probably occurs on frames that were <em>not</em> in the canister (or spool etc if not 35mm) at the point where whatever big temperature / humidity change caused it happened. So, really I'm guessing that there was condensation happening inside the camera, and that this affected the parts of the film that were surrounded by air at that point.</p>

<p>I have just been printing from some of my last rolls of this, and it's just wonderful stuff: I won't miss how curly and painful it is to handle, but the image quality is just lovely: it's almost as fine-grain as 4x5 FP4. And I have one, partly-used, roll left.</p> <p>Does anyone who has used CHS25 have recommendations for what I might use to replace it? I want something available in 120 (4x5 would be nice too, 35mm would be a bonus but don't need it), that doesn't need weird chemistry (which I think their CMS20 does), slow is fine, very fine grain, reasonably available. I know about Pan F though I've not used it for a while, and I'm going to try a few rolls of that, so I'm looking for suggestions that aren't that.</p> <p>Thanks</p> <p>--tim</p>

<p>I'm a newcomer to LF but have processed roll film for a very long time: long enough that I can't remember how hard I found it to load spirals when I started, or how long I took to become good at it – certainly I can now load 35mm & 120 spirals in my sleep.</p> <p>I have a MOD54 (not quite the latest version) and I'm finding it hard to get film into it without scarring the edge of the film (in the image area), and additionally hard to load film without getting <em>extremely</em> frustrated by the whole thing. I have probably loaded ~25 sheets so far. I found loading darkslides hard at first, but I can now do that pretty well, unlike with the MOD54 which seems to be getting no easier at all.</p> <p>So, well, 25 sheets is not a lot of course, so may be I am just expecting to get good at if too quickly. On the other hand, I seem to be getting no better at all, which is depressing and expensive in terms of damaged negs (I suppose I could make a feature of the scars, in the same way people do by printing the whole neg including characteristic border marks...), so perhaps I should bite the bulled and try and find some more dedicated system.</p> <p>So, if you're a MOD54 user, how long did it take you to become good at it? If the answer is "you never do get good at it" (which seems unlikely) what else do you use now?</p> <p>Thanks</p>