My dear long departed Grandmother, Dorothy's, old Box Brownie camera I have just discovered, contains a roll of exposed AgfaColor DNS film. I want to process this gift from the past to see if it still holds some images after all these years. I have emailed Agfa and asked the local PhotoLabs but none can help me. I would appreciate any help/ideas how I can recover photos from this roll of film. Thanks, Paul

-- Paul Harrington (pharry@es.co.nz), June 29, 2000

Answers

I think you'll find it's CNS film. I've never heard of DNS, although it may have been a brief sucessor to the old CNS. CNS was around in the early to mid 1960s to my knowledge. It may have been introduced even earlier. The film isn't compatible with today's chemistry, and didn't have the contrast mask of todays film. It wouldn't be easily printable on todays colour paper, although you might be able get results from digital scanning. I used it a couple of times, and developed and printed it at home. The colour wasn't up to much.

You have two options as I see it.

(1)Forget about the colour, and develop it as a black and white film. (Advantages: The chemicals are cheaply and easily obtainable, the negatives would be printable on current materials. Disadvantages: You'd need to experiment with the processing time and maybe lose a couple of exposures; you'd end up with B&W prints)

(2)I can give you the formulae for the CNS process. (Advantages: You might end up with some lacklustre colour prints. Disadvantages: You'd have to obtain the expensive chemicals, make them up, and hope that you ended up with usable negatives at the end of it.)

Hope this is of some use.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), June 30, 2000.

Ooops! When I checked up I discovered that my memory had tricked me by a decade. Agfa CNS was around in the mid 1970s, and it did have a mask. I was confusing it with its predecessor, CN17S. The only thing that changes, though, is that being masked, it may be printable on modern colour papers. I've got the formulary for both CNS and CN17S.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), July 01, 2000.

Thanks, Pete. Yes, on closer inspection I see that I do have CNS film. I would like to explore the possibility of attempting the process myself, so any further advice you are able to lend me would be welcome. Thanks again for your help. Paul

-- Paul Harrington (pharry@es.co.nz), July 02, 2000.

Hi Paul. Give me a day or two to get around to scanning and OCRing the formulae and instructions, and I'll e-mail 'em to you. If you haven't heard by mid-week, give me a nudge.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), July 02, 2000.