Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/04/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>One of the prime difficulties in finding 'good' b&w printing papers is that >the production of such is an environmental disaster. Thus, large-volume >producers such as AGFA and Kodak have been forced to reduce the silver >content in their papers to comply with environmental regulations, and this >has led to greyer blacks and muddier whites in a lot of papers. > I do not have any figures about the actual silver content in papers old and new, regulated or not. I do have, however, sensitometric values from my densitometer. I must say that all modern papers (fiber based and RC coated (Kodak, Agfa, Ilford,Guilleminot and Oriental)) I have tested (when developed in top class paper developers) got deep blacks around D= 2,20 and clean whites around D=0,05. These values are in the same league as any readings I have collected from the papers produced in the seventies and even earlier. Deep black is generally equated with densities around D=2,10 to D=2,40. Grey black is normally positioned around D=1,70. Every paper I know of can easily surpass this value. Only papers with a nonglossy surface are around D=1,60 and could be interpreted as grey black. That grand master,Ansel Adams, reported in his books the same values and he was quite critical about the blacks and whites. So I have no factual evidence that the silver content of the newer papers is less than it used to be and if this were the case then the correlation between silver content and the visual impression of 'blackness' is less straight forward than proposed. Erwin Puts