From: Sandy King (sanking@clemson.edu)
Date: 04/27/03-01:40:58 PM Z
Carl Weese wrote:
>Really, the reason I use
>Pt/Pd instead of switching to kallitype is that it's so much easier. Because
>of the elaborate processing, producing kallitypes takes about three times as
>long as making the same number of platinums. It saves a couple bucks per
>print compared to platinum, but so what when the cost of a platinum print is
>less than the boards you mat it in? When I've tried kalli, not only did the
>prints take longer to make but the failure rate was higher, making the
>effective time investment enormous. Even for the self-unemployed like me,
>time is worth something.
>
Carl,
I agree with your comments about kallitype versus platinum in terms
of the shorter time needed to process a print. About three times as
long sounds fairly reasonable to me.
However, I don't agree that the failure rate with kallitype should be
any higher than it is with platinum. I recently spent about two weeks
in a row printing nothing but kallitype and did not have a single
failure that was the result of the process. You mentioned last year
that you experienced some form of streaking. Frankly I have never
experienced streaking of any kind with my coating technique and my
failure rate is about zero. But of course I use the magic brush.
Cost comparisons are very difficult to make since a couple of dollars
may not mean the same as my couple of dollars, for a whole variety of
reasons. In any event, when we start talking of making very large
prints the difference is a lot more than the couple of dollars you
suggest. For example, what would be the chemical costs of making a
20X24" Pt/Pd print.
Finally, any comparison of kallitype with Pt/Pd must take into
consideration that although both can produce permanent prints that
are visually identical, both have alternative methods for achieving
different kinds of looks via double or triple toning and the use of
metal additives in the sensitize. This is such a complicated area
that I am not sure which development method offers the most
possibilities but my inclination is believe that it is kallitype. The
reason is that with kallitype you start with a noble metal, silver,
which can be followed with the more noble metals gold, palladium and
platinum. In other words, it is possible to have tones with a
kallitype that show all of the metals. I don't believe this can be
achieved so easily with Pt/Pd because in toning it is not possible
(Or is it?) to replace a more noble metal with a less noble one. I
was pretty impressed with the different tones Witho Worms gets with
the use of additives to the basic Pt/Pd formula but as he described
the process it appeared to be balanced fairly tightly between success
and failure. When I saw his prints the first things that crossed my
mind was that the effect would be much easier to achieve in kallitype
with double toning than with the additive method, but perhaps not.
Sandy
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