RC vs. fiber - beginner's question

[David Beal]

First, don't discount the possibility that you will have relatives or children of relatives who will be alive after you've gone to work apprenticing for Blessed St. Ansel. In my dining room is a shot of my wife's grandfather when he was a young man. It's easily 100+. By today's standards it isn't a stunning portrait. The technical quality is so-so. But it is priceless!

Second: fiber base can be successfully washed without running water. The trick -- which is no trick -- is successive soaks, and changes of water. If you do the math on the extraction process (which I used to be able to do, when I was doing physical organic chemistry), it doesn't take too many changes of solvent to effect a 99% extraction of solute from a two phase system. Running water does extract fixer, but it isn't the only way. The soak/change method is describe in old photo literature, and at one time Kodak included information about it with packages of paper.

The disadvantage of soak/change is that it's labor intensive. The advantage is that you can use distilled water, at 75 degrees F, which makes for more efficient extraction.

Good luck.

/s/ David Beal ** Memories Preserved Photography, LLC

[Jim Rhoades]

Make the best print you can on some plastic paper. Make the best print you can on real paper. If you can't see the difference, take up stamp collecting. Like many others I do use RC for proofs. I also used an iron for many years and the mounts are still holding well. I have a few prints that were tray washed and iron mounted 40 years ago.

[windpointphoto]

Read Jim Rhoades post. Print it in big letters and hang it in your darkroom. If you make the best print you can on both papers (you don't have to dry mount to compare) and you can live with the RC, go for it. Dry mounting is easy to do with an iron.

[Mark Sawyer]

"...when an RC print is mounted in a sealed frame and displayed under light, the titanium dioxide used as a brightener for the paper base sometimes reacts with the plastic coating and/or the image silver to produce serious, irreversible damage to the image silver, the plastic coating, or both."

I believe titanium dioxide has not been used as a brightener since the late 70's, when this problem was discovered. Modern RC papers should be good for 100 years, presuming proper processing and storage/display.

I've made some lovely prints on RC paper, and could live with only printing RC quite happily... except that when I print the same negative on fiber-based paper, it has just a little more depth, a little more richness, a little more... more! I suppose it comes down to whether a print being 95% of what it could be is good enough. There is a visible difference.

But it's also a valid point that for an inexperienced/occassional printer, RC paper is easier to print on, process, and handle. Some people who print fairly well on RC produce visibly worse prints on fiber based papers. And the longer life of a FB print doesn't count for much if you only give it a two-minute wash, squeegee it face down in a puddle of fixer, handle it with oily fingers, and matt it on illustration board...

[Oren Grad]

I believe titanium dioxide has not been used as a brightener since the late 70's, when this problem was discovered. Modern RC papers should be good for 100 years, presuming proper processing and storage/display.

I don't know if that's true, but Ctein's published tests documenting quite spectacular deterioration of RC papers on framed display are much more recent than that. I think we unfortunately have to assume that not all of the stability problems are solved. It's still prudent to use toner and/or Sistan in processing RC prints intended for display.