Digital BW, The Print

I've ordered Julio's kit. It is very well put together and I generally 
felt that it was worth the money.  Although you may be right that one 
might be able to put the kit together one's self.  While this may be 
tempting, I like to spend my time creating photographs rather than 
creating equipment and then modifying it until I get it figured out 
and how it should work. Julio has already done all of the trial and 
error, which is partly what you are paying for.  I don't mind people 
making a profit if I feel I benefit from their products.

The kit consist of a mask that holds the the glass with wet mounted 
film to it.  The mask comes with additional mask of varying 
thickness's so that you can determine the optimum thickness which will 
give you optimum focus with your individual scanner.

I will agree that Julio isn't a great technical writer; I found the 
manual that comes with the kit a little difficult to understand as 
well, but was able to figure things out fairly easily.

One thing I would recommend is to not order the 35mm kit. As I had a 
very difficult time getting the film to flatten out on the glass.  
What I would recommend with 35mm film is to use the 120 film holder; 
where there is more area for the clear cover sheet to hold the 35mm 
film down flat. And then use small pieces of the mask material, which 
Julio includes to mask out the area around the negitive or slide.

Randy

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "dfaprinting" 
<dfaprinting@y...> wrote:
> To me the kit sounds like some kind of fluid (of course), and after 
> that I'm not sure. These scanners seem to want to focus film about 
1mm 
> off the glass, so do you just get some 1mm thick anti-Newton glass 
and 
> some kind of fluid to stick the slide to the A.N. glass? (anti-
Newton 
> side goes down toward scanner glass???)
> 
> The only thing I found while searching for answers was that removing 
> the glass from your scanner had a very slight effect on the 
resulting 
> scan. Not really enough to bother, and it wasn't in reference to wet 
> mounting either.