Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/01/17
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>so where's the Leica advantage here, beyond the security of the merely >theoretical? Theoretical, my foot! I used reloadable cassettes for years and found out that they can scratch the film in every conceiveable way -- front, back, parellel lines the whole length of a film, single scratches for single frames, even slanting lines. I bought every brand of cassette, cleaned them with compressed air, kept them in a dust-free drawer, kept track of how many rolls went through each. They still almost all developed scratches. But that isn't the worst thing about bulk loading your own film. The worst thing is that the tail end of the roll, the last few inches, that you attach to the spool in the light before putting it into the lighttight Watson to load, gets fogged. The result is when you have finished shooting 36 and there is suddenly the perfect shot in front of you and you shoot it on frame 37, you get zilch because 37 has been partially fogged in the loading process. That is why I quit bulk loading, and I've never had any regrets. Nor any more scratched negatives. Nor any more lost last frames on the roll.