Rondinax, Rondix, Essex, Kent: New Blog and Resource Site for Daylight-Loading Developing Tanks

I have just launched a new blog/website on daylight-loading developing tanks. It includes links to videos which show how easy it is to use these tanks for developing 120 and 35 mm film, downloads of instruction manuals, tips on buying and something of their history. It is still a work in progress and more material is being added.

For those wanting to develop films without a darkroom as well as experienced users, I hope readers of this blog will enjoy the new one.

It is at:

http://rondinax.wordpress.com

Scanning 35mm Slides...If Only They Were All Kodachromes

As well as the 4 x 4 cm Superslides I have written about previously, I have scanned thousands of 35 mm full frame (24 x 36) and half-frame (18 x 24) transparencies, dating from 1956 to 2002.

Whenever I read an account of slide scanning, the writer has concluded that Kodachromes had survived the passage of time in better condition than any other transparencies. I can only agree. But many of us were tempted by the home processing of Ferraniacolor or the marketing that promoted Agfacolor CT18, for example.

My Ferraniacolors have actually survived well. The colour is maintained including the yellowish tinge they had originally. They now look better scanned with their colour corrected than they ever did projected when newly processed.

Two films stood out as poor. The first, the old film of the two, is Agfacolor CT18. A few slides have turned a purplish shade over the years but the main problem is ‘grain’. I have put ‘grain’ in inverted commas because the term seems to cover a multitude of sins. Scanning the films, I noticed a very great difference between films. In other words, the degree of ‘graininess’ was similar in slides of a similar subject taken on one film but different on a different film. Thus, ‘grain’ varied from acceptable to dreadful. Such a difference clearly indicates a difference in manufacture or in processing.

The effect was particularly noticeable in half-frame transparencies because the size of the grain was greater in proportion to the image.

In an attempt to get better scans, I searched for more information. What is the ‘grain’ and are there hardware/software solutions to getting better scans?

In colour film, ‘dye clouds’ rather than ‘grain’ is a better term for the final result of film development. Is the scanner, though, simply picking up what is there or is what is there being exaggerated by the optical scanning process? The latter is known as ‘grain aliasing’ and there has been some discussion of this phenomenon (see below for links to websites). I do not think the problem with the Agfacolor CT18 slides at the poor end of the apparent graininess spectrum lies with grain aliasing. There was no apparent change in structure or position at different scanning resolutions or in different scanners. There was no effect of changing the scan direction across the slide. Furthermore, the same structures could be seen in the transparency under a microscope. By now, I was convinced that the ‘grain’ had a physical presence that was not being increased by the scanning process.

I tried several standard grain-reducing bits of software including Nikon Scan (when Nikon supported the software for their scanners), VueScan and Epson Scan during the scanning process. There was a little improvement but not much. If the graininess apparent in the scans was really there, were there any software solutions to remove it. Because graininess is a form of noise in the image, I tried the standard noise reduction controls in Photoshop and Aperture with little effect.

Then I then came across an article by Norman Koren on Grain and Sharpness in Scans and Enlarger Prints (website address given below). He recommended Neat Image and showed some examples of grain reduction in scanned images. Within minutes, I had loaded the trial version, installed it as a plug-in in Aperture and tried it on a few scans. The result was that a few minutes afterwards I paid for it and had the software in operation. I can only describe the effect as amazing. Only the worst two films still show obvious graininess and they were really bad to start off with. Even with them there has been a significant improvement, the worst effects of graininess being apparent in areas of sky.

So far I have been dealing with Agfacolor CT18. The other poor but more modern film was a Fuji transparency film (not Velvia) I used in Botswana in 2001. That showed a similar problem. Again, there was considerable improvement using Neat Image.

With the Agfacolor CT18 scans, I have never been completely convinced that the problem was in the emulsion per se. The appearance I can best describe as a reticulation (not the old burst blister appearance of reticulated film but think of the pattern of a Reticulated Giraffe) could have been in the base layer. I even wondered if the films had been varnished after processing and rubbed one over with alcohol to see if any coating could be removed (there was no effect). Then I came across a 2002 article by Nick Rains on Fuji 'Pepper Grain' The Mystery Resolved (website address below). The problem, as Fuji apparently admitted, was in the film base, not the emulsion. The effect was not apparent with wet, drum scanning, only with dry. Since the effect could be removed with Digital ICE technology (mine could not) we clearly are not dealing with the same phenomenon but I don’t think we can eliminate the film base from consideration entirely with the 1960s CT18.

This following is a comparison of enlarged images of a scanned full-frame  35 mm transparency taken in 2001 on a Fuji transparency film before (A) and after treatment with Neat Image (B). You should be able to see the difference. Finally, the best I could get out of this slide and, really, you do not want to see the untreated version.

A Scanned 35 mm Fuji transparency before and B after application of Neat Image.
The full frame version of B is shown below

Returning to where I started, why did we not take everything on Kodachrome? Well, Kodachrome was more expensive and it was slower. In the mid-1950s and using film speeds published in the BJ Almanac, Kodachrome was only 10 ASA. To put that figure into perspective, the ‘standard’ ASA setting on my Nikon D700 is 200 or more than 4 stops faster than the old Kodachrome. Ferraniacolor was 1 stop faster at 20 ASA and Agfacolor CT18 (18° DIN) was 50 ASA — more than 2 stops faster than Kodachrome. The next version of Kodachrome at 25 ASA brought that difference down to 1 stop.

For half-frame films, processing by Kodak was a hassle, whereas other processors, like Agfa, offered mounting in card or plastic after processing. My wife with her Olympus Pen FT avoided Kodak for that reason.

I think I have now finished with trying to get the best possible scans from my old slides. There will be one more article in this series but that’s it for 35 mm and 127 film Superslides. Somebody asked me the other day whether I would like to go back to colour film from digital capture. The answer is: NO! Only the luddites (and the real luddites at least had the excuse that their livelihoods were at stake) don’t realise that we have never had it so good. That’s my view on colour; to monochrome I shall return another day.

Website Addresses

Norman Koren Website (follow links there to earlier studies on grain aliasing): 

http://bit.ly/15vRclv

Fuji ‘Pepper Grain’ on The Luminous Landscape

http://bit.ly/ZfG2Nx

Neat Image Website†
http://www.neatimage.com

†I had an unexpected benefit from using this software which I will cover in a future post.

Scanning Old 4 x 4 Super Slides — Part 2

Following on from the last post on 4 x 4 cm superslides, I scanned those in glassless plastic mounts in the Epson V500’s frame for 5 x 5 m (2” x 2”). For the transparencies I removed from edge-bound glass mounts, I left the thin paper or foil mask around them. For those I removed from the glazed plastic mounts, I simple dropped them onto the bed of the scanner, fully expecting to see Newton rings. But I didn’t and so carried on.

One problem I did have early on with the V500 was sometimes getting purplish-pink vertical lines on the scans. A quick Google search showed this problem is caused by dirt on the first few inches of the scanner bed. A good clean of this area was the answer; cleaning the area to be scanned was not sufficient.

At the outset I set out what I was trying to achieve. I did not want to have to scan these transparencies ever again. Therefore, I decided to scan at a resolution that would yield a reasonable-sized print in the unlikely event that I would want a print. Most of my old photographs are viewed either on the iMac screen, iPad, or on the television either as HD video or DVD.

I decided to scan at 3200 dpi. Printing at 300 dpi would give me a 15” x 15” (38 x 38 cm) print from these superslides.

Incidentally, I have found a lot of utter rubbish written about the scanning capabilities of the Epson V500 on internet fora. Some people have claimed (without providing any evidence, visual or historic) that the maximum ‘optical’ or ‘hardware’ (i.e. non-interpolated) resolution is about 2400 dpi and that anything above that is interpolated. However, the Epson website clearly states that the optical resolution of the V500 is 6400 dpi.

I did actually check that I was getting better resolution at higher dpis by enlarging in Photoshop the scans at 1200, 2400 and 3200 dpi to the same size (in cm) as that reached at 4800 dpi, with all set to 300 dpi. I then cropped a small area of detail from each, copied them to an A4 sheet and printed them on glossy paper. Resampling for the enlargements was kept at bicubic throughout. My argument for doing this check was that if 2400 were the maximum optical resolution, then scans at 3200 and 4800 should appear no better since they would have been resampled in scanner. In fact, at this enormous final size (nearly 2 feet or 60 cm square) there was a discernible difference on the printed output. 1200 dpi, not surprisingly, gave the poorest resolution since interpolation to the final size was greatest. Both 3200 and 4800 dpi were sharper than 2400 dpi but I really could not separate 3200 and 4800. Clearly though, 2400 is not the maximum optical resolution in this scanner.

I should stress that these comparisons were made on a print at 300 dpi. Unfortunately, at screen resolution the small differences cannot be seen and so it is not worth trying to show the print in the space available in a blog post.

I scanned using Epson Scan software in ‘Professional’ mode. I compared in trials 24- and 48-bit but found no difference in output. So I settled on 24-bit, with a considerable saving in file size. I also tried various settings for unsharp mask, grain reduction, dust removal or digital ICE. Here is one comparison:

Slices of scans of the same slide scanned in the Epson V500 (Epson Scan software)

A. No additions

B. + Unsharp Mask - Medium; Grain Reduction - Medium; Dust Removal

C. + Unsharp Mask - Medium; Grain Reduction - Medium; Digital ICE

D. + Unsharp Mask - Medium; Grain Reduction - Medium; Digital ICE; Colour Restoration

For these old slides, I eventually settled on: Unsharp Mask - Medium; Grain Reduction - Medium; Colour Restoration and Digital ICE (Quality or Speed, depending on condition).

The .tif files generated (63+ MB) were imported into Aperture for final tweaking.

I said in the earlier post that my Superslides were either Agfacolor CT18 or Ektrachrome X. I shall return to CT18 in another post but there is no doubt that the Ektachrome X slides have been the better survivors overall. However, CT18 slides survived either extremely well or fared badly in relation to the development of a purple cast. There was nothing in between. By contrast, the Ektachrome X slides seemed to have survived with little or no colour degradation. I was not that keen on the colour rendition of Ektachrome X in the 1960s (a cold, blue film). The irony is that they look better after scanning and with some colour correction than they ever did in a viewer or projected on a screen.

I have been able to improve on the originals by using gentle manipulations in Aperture or Photoshop. Details have appeared from shadows, for example, while highlights can (sometimes) be held in check.

Finally, two scans of superslides taken with a Rolleiflex 4 x 4 in Macau in March 1966.

Macau. March 1966. Agfacolor CT18. Rolleiflex 4 x 4
A photograph extending from deep shadow to direct, sub-tropical sunlight
on the wall

Macau. March 1966. Agfacolor CT18. Rolleiflex 4 x 4

Scanning Old 4 x 4 Super Slides

A Superslide, projected in a run of 35 mm transparencies, could make a 1950s or 1960s audience gasp. Square at 40 x 40 mm, rather than 24 x 36, a good superslide showed better gradation, sharpness and vibrancy than its counterpart from a 35 mm film camera. Compared with a 6 x 6 transparency from what is now called a medium format camera using 120 film (then along with 35 mm classified as ‘miniature’) the superslide offered one great advantage: it could be shown in the same projectors as 35 mm 24 x 36 mm transparencies rather than the extremely expensive machines made for the larger film size.

But then, as now, a good big one (whether film size or sensor) beats a good little one.

Superslides were from 127 size rollfilm, each spool producing 12 transparencies. The major camera producing superslides was the Rolleiflex 4 x 4 — the grey baby. Its f3.5 Xenar lens produced excellent results.

There were disadvantages. Kodachrome was not made in 127 size (with hindsight a major disadvantage) and films had to be changed more frequently, a nuisance when travelling.

A disadvantage certainly not apparent at the time is scanning. Although the superslide mount is the same size as the standard 35 mm mount, conventional 35 mm slide scanners, like my Nikon Coolscan IV, only cover an aperture of 24 x 36 mm. One can scan the central part of the superslide in either direction but it is not possible to cover the 40 x 40 mm.

The Epson V500 seemed to offer the best chance of getting a good scan from superslides at a modest cost.

I had used three sorts of slide mount. Firstly, ones made from the basic components (two glass plates, a cardboard mask and tape); secondly, commercial plastic mounts with anti-newton ring glass on both sides; thirdly I had some in plastic mounts without glass.

My 4 x 4 transparencies were in glass sealed mounts (left), plastic unglazed
mounts (right) or plastic mounts with glass (see below)

The glassless mounts were easy to scan. However, a number of transparencies in them had wrinkled especially round the edges so they were no longer flat and straight walls, for example, were no longer straight.

Plastic slide mount without glass (as received from the processor)
showing the wrinkling

When trying to scan some equally old Minox transparencies I had damaged two by removing them from their mounts. The emulsion had stuck to the glass and remained there. Therefore, I was very reluctant to risk the superslides and scanned them in the V500 through the anti-newton rings glass. The results were good but not so good as with slides scanned without glass.

Since scanning them a few years ago, it has irked me that they had not been scanned to their full potential. So, a few weeks ago, I took the bull by the horns and decided to remove all the other superslides from their mounts and scan them again.

At this stage I hit a problem. I could remount those in plastic mounts with glass easily enough, but those in the bound-edged glass I could not. Easy, I thought, I will buy some new superslide mounts for those bound fully in glass. Not so easy, as it turned out because superslide mounts are no longer in production by the likes of Gepe. So I had to find a stop-gap measure and a long-term solution to storing those re-scanned transparencies.

I opened the glass-bound slides by slitting the tape along the edge of three sides and removing the inner mask and transparency. After scanning, the slide was reassembled and closed along the bottom edge only using a piece of self-adhesive black tape of the same width as the old tape over the old tape. The slide was no longer flat because of the extra thickness so this was a stop-gap measure. The only reliable source of Superslide mounts is eBay and when they appear they are not cheap. However, I have been able to obtain sufficient to remount all my superslides originally mounted in glass and not plastic.

The transparencies from the edge-bound glass mounts are now in GEPE
glazed mounts (left). Others were returned to their 1960s F&P colour
glazed mounts (right)

Before going on to how I scanned these slides, I should say that they were either Agfacolor CT18 (not Agfachrome — Agfa did not then use chrome to denote a reversal film) or Ektachrome X.

How I scanned these Superslides will be the subject of my next post.

Rondinax and Rondix: Daylight Developing Tanks

It is often forgotten that it was — and still is — possible to develop films without having to use a darkroom or changing bag. Most developing tanks sold in the UK had to be loaded in the dark, a process often accompanied by curses as the film jammed or buckled in the reel or chinks of light were spotted around the shutters that were used to cover the windows of a temporary darkroom.

I was given my first developing tank by a great-uncle who had bought it in the 1930s. This Agfa Rondinax 60 was for 120/620 films and I used it for black-and-white films until the 1990s. The Rondinax 60 was a brilliantly designed and constructed but simple daylight tank. No darkroom was necessary. It was also extremely economical to use because the volumes of developer and fixer needed were small. Rondinax 60s, to judge by the prices they reach on eBay, are still a popular purchase for those still using 120 back-and-white film. The only disadvantage was that the spiral had to be rotated continuously (with the recommended short, jerky movements) during developing, rinsing (stop bath) and fixing. However, I see somebody has arranged a motor drive to automate the turning (which I think goes a little too quickly) and a video of it in action is on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkxQcLTx4Bw

Instructions for the Rondinax 60 can be found at: 

http://www.urmonas.net/manuals/rondinax/rondinax.html


The 35 mm equivalent was the Rondinax 35 U, also marketed by Leica as the Leitz Rondinax 35, particularly in the USA. Both these tanks had black plastic spirals. The film was dragged onto the spiral by a belt of ‘American cloth’ (rubber-coated cloth) along a plastic film guide. The rubber on the cloth perishes with age but the fabric without the rubber continued to work well for me.

The Rondinax 35 had a stablemate, the Rondix 35, which worked without a spiral and again entirely in daylight. Photographs of the tank are are at:

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-wiki.en/index.php/Rondix

The Rondix is far less well known than the Rondinax but was much cheaper to buy. My grandfather bought one around 1957 and, again, I used it until the late 1990s. In this tank, the end of the film is attached to a small central drum and the film wound into the tank from the cassette until the entire film is tight on the drum and resistance is felt on the winding handle. Then the handle is reversed so that the film turns back on itself to become wound on the drum in the opposite direction. When resistance is felt again, the direction is reversed, and so on until developing and fixing are complete.

The film, therefore, sloshes around in the developer/fixer and is never in contact with another loop of film for more than a few seconds at most. I have made a quick diagram to show the principle.

How the Rondix 35 Developing Tank Works without a spiral

Instructions for the Rondix 35 are at:

http://www.sandham.com/?path=Agfa_Rondix.htm%3f


The Rondix 35 was clearly not so popular as the Rondinax 35 (and neither as popular as the cheaper, vertical tanks that needed to be loaded in the dark). We wondered then whether people thought the film, not being held on a spiral, would be more likely to get scratched but we never found that to be the case. In fact, the Rondix tank and filtered developer produced some of the cleanest negatives I ever produced.

I had several Agfa Karat cameras which used special cassettes for cut lengths of 35 mm film. The film passed from cassette to cassette as in a roll film camera but without the backing paper. I thought the Rondix could not be used because the end of the film was not held in the cassette. However, I see in the more recent instructions that Agfa Rapid cassettes could be used (again, the film was not held). In this case one is instructed to do so many turns to the left and then so many turns to the right, and so on, in order not to pull the entire film into the tank. I would not liked to have risked losing count.

Only two sizes of Rondinax/Rondix tank were produced: for 120/620 and 35 mm film. The significant omission is, of course, 127 and for that size, a darkroom-loading, vertical, ‘universal’ type of tank was needed. I had a Rolleiflex 4 x 4 in the early to mid-1960s and black-and-white processing had to wait for a visit to the darkroom. I had been spoilt by the Rondinax 60 and the Rondix. Daylight-loading 127 tanks were made by an Austrian firm before the second world war and imported after the war but I never saw one advertised.

I never tried reversal processing in these tanks. There was no transparent spiral in the Rondinax 60 to allow exposure to light. Reversal processing may have been possible in the Rondix if a glass or transparent sheet had been held over the film in place of the lid. Turning the handle (with water in the tank) so that light reached the whole film may have done the trick. Again, I did not risk it. The Polly-Max tank I used for 127 films was used for reversal processing of Ferraniacolor.

Informative websites on the history of these tanks are:

http://www.summilux.net/labo/rondinax/
http://www.photomemorabilia.co.uk/Paterson/Developing_Tanks/Tank_History.html


Post second world war copies of the Rondinax 35 (the ‘Essex’ and 60 (the ‘Kent’ were made in a collaboration between Johnsons of Hendon and Neville Brown (NEBRO) in the early 1950s, presumably from designs and patents confiscated by the allies. I have never seen one and the advertisements must have been before my time. By 1955, Agfa was in full flow advertising the Rondinax 35U and the 60 as the advertisement from the BJ Alamanac for 1956 shows (the BJ Almanac for a particular year appeared, as I recall, in the preceding autumn). I think the Rondix 35 appeared the next year.