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Film Washing myths.

Tim Gilbert film washing

Film Washing myths.

It's not a power washer. Some people mistakenly believe that washing film under running water is like using a power washer on their driveway. It's not. The running water is not blasting away the residual thiosulfate (fixer). The thiosulfate is actually embedded in the emulsion and can only be removed by diffusion (or dispersion, we'll let the chemists argue over the difference). While the chemistry behind this gets really complex really quickly, the concept is simple. It's more like soaking a dirty pan in the sink to remove the baked-on grease. Basically, the universe likes things in equilibrium. Thus the concentration...

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New technique for loading the film holders.

Tim Gilbert 4x5 film loading film holders SP-445

New technique for loading the film holders.

Slickest way we've found yet to load the film holders.

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Once in a Blue Moon Photo Contest, how to enter

Tim Gilbert

Once in a Blue Moon Photo Contest, how to enter

We finally found a new hosting site; we'll see how this works out. Here are the details.  

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What about 8x10 or 5x7?

Glenn Egli

What about 8x10 or 5x7?

We get questions almost weekly regarding the SP-2810 or SP-457 (these were our 8x10 and 5x7 versions of the SP-445.)  As most of you know, we launched kickstarters for both and neither met its funding goal. Hence, we've done no further development (ignore the pun) on either system. Why not? We'll skip the technical challenges (they can almost always be solved) and jump right into the marketing/business obstacles. The obvious question: is the market big enough? Answer: no one really knows. But frankly, we don't think that the size of the market is the issue but rather the demographics of...

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SP-Rack: project launch on Indiegogo!

Tim Gilbert

SP-Rack: project launch on Indiegogo!

You asked for it! So here it is: SP-rack Nothing really new since our last blog post other than the campaign is live. Oh, you get to vote on the color (please don't vote for black.) Now before you ask: why did we abandon Kickstarter and jump to Indiegogo? Actually, we submitted this to Kickstarter and it was rejected! Something about us needing to explain that it was just a prototype and that they weren't sure we could handle such a complicated project. (Yeah, right.) We've always been frustrated their approval process anyway (it can take 12 hours or several...

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