Ensuring quality

Two people have the main responsibility to ensure the best possible quality in the process of duplicating or printing a film element,

The grader, or the person responsible for taking decisions about the duplication routes, has the responsibility for choosing the printing equipment accordingly to the materials to be printed, to their characteristics, and to the results aimed. He has also the responsibility to provide the printer with all the information he needs in order to perform a good work.

On the other hand, the operator who is operating the machine has the responsibility to verify that the information he received is complete and comprehensive, and to verify that all settings and controls are correctly performed. He must also be able to report any sort of problems he might have noticed, so that the grader can modify the duplication route or the machine chosen, accordingly. Whenever we use a printing equipment, in order to obtain the very best results in terms of duplication or printing, we must be aware of the inherent characteristics of that particular machine, then, it will be a printer’s responsibility to make sure, by testing and correct maintenance, that the performance will be always consistent and coherent. Each printing equipment, according to it’s type (contact, optical, wet-gate, dry, continuous, step, etc.) and to it’s design and manufacture, has quite different performances in terms of:

  1. Resolution
    that should be evaluated not only in general terms, but in relationship with the conditions of the material to be printed; so a printer might not have a particularly good resolution, but it can perform particularly well if dealing with badly curled originals.
  2. Contrast;
    all printers produce more or less important variations of contrast; this is particularly evident if we compare an optical and a contact printer, but also two contact printers, having very different light sources, can deeply differ.
  3. Steadiness;
    in this case, it is of major importance that the conditions of the original materials are kept into account. A printer with the highest degree of steadiness might be completely inappropriate to duplicate or print from a shrunk element.
  4. Performances with archival materials;
    in this case, the choice of the printer must be taken according to the conditions of the materials; here the reasons for a choice can be quite different, from brittleness to curling, or the fact that the film is decomposing, or that it is printed completely out of rack, etc. To know very well the performance and a limit of every printing equipment that we can use within our laboratory is of major importance in this case.
  5. Other reasons;
    in some cases, other reasons can alter to the choice, such as printing speed, or reliability of the printer, or the experience of the operator on one equipment rather than on another, or cueing device mounted (FCC rather than notches, for example), or exposure control performances (not enough light on a printer compared to another).

In conclusion, the choice of a printer is always a quite complicated issue, involving many questions and the evaluation of many parameters. Therefore, it is of major importance that the operator follows the instructions received, without changing them before discussing the issue with the grader. At the same time, we must also remind that whenever we work with archival materials, it is of major importance to check carefully all the parameters and the adjustments that are needed, in order to avoid any problem. Also, if the printer is not sure that that particular film will perform correctly on the specified printer, it is always advisable to produce a test, or at least to test the mechanical performances of the film and the machine.