Digital BW, The Print

As I was straightening up my darkroom I ran across a bottle of "Sprint  
End Run Print Brightener Converter" that I bought sometime in the  
mid-80's.

The label gives no indication of the ingredient(s), but it was pretty  
cheap, easy to use, and effective with silver-gelatin papers. (And if  
I brightened a print too much it produced an astonishingly ugly print!)

For those of us not put off by the very idea of optical brighteners,  
it might add another level of control to some inkjet papers (assuming  
your inks can survive a water soak).

In my years of darkroom printing I don't recall people being wound up  
at all about the presence or absence of brighteners, except as a  
matter of aesthetics. We all knew that if you washed brightened papers  
too long you could wash out the brighteners, and that this would  
probably occur in an uneven fashion, but no one that I know of advised  
against using brightened papers for archival purposes.

Are we being pickier than we (ie photographers) used to be, or are  
inkjet papers more susceptible to degradation because of "brightener  
breakdown"???

BTW, Sprint actually touted its brightener as enhancing archival  
qualities of the print by preventing UV from damaging the image or  
paper (presumably by converting the UV energy into visible light).

I just checked, and Sprint is still in existence... and still offers  
End Run Print Brightener Converter:

http://sprintsystems.com/productmenu.htm

You'll notice that most of their products are diluted the same 1:9 for  
a working solution. I think this is one of the reasons Sprint was  
popular around photo schools and workshops. I first saw it at the  
Maine Photographic Workshop in Rockport, Maine.

But enough of this simple *chemistry*...  back to those maddening ink  
clogs    :-)

Myron