Any cons printing behind a glass?

Unless it is coated optical glass you will get problems with flare and reflections reducing quality and further loss of quality due to lack of flatness of the glass. A borderless easel is a better solution.

Marty
 
I sometimes print behind an old bit of glass from an oven door I found. It is very scratched and thick and produces interesting results. But not if you want clear, sharp prints.
 
Borderless

Borderless

The best solution currently available is an electrostatic easel. They are both quiet and energy efficient. The next in line are vacuum frames. The vacuum pumps tend to be loud, draw a lot of current and their hoses are often in the way and... but they work well..

The least costly but also effective solution is a DIY approach: 3M removable adhesive spray applied to a suitably sized piece of industrial coated (plastic, melamine clad) MDF--- or suitable particleboard. The solution is quiet, uses even less energy than the electrostatic boards and is very cheap to "purchase".

Glass works but its both expensive and quiet susceptible to dust. There are problems that demand glass but borderlesss printing to a piece of photopaper is no longer of them....
 
When I did borderless, I used to hold down the paper with some drops of water on the backside, on a fairly smooth (e.g. laminated) enlarger baseboard. There were basicaly two downsides:

1. Sometimes the paper would be tough to pull back off the enlarger plate, and I would damage the edge of the print with my fingernails. I never solved this.
2. If you get water on the emulsion side, you will get white fingerprints when developing. I solved this by having a towel at hand.

Then HCB saved me by convincing me to use the whole negative, which rules out borderless printing for most paper sizes...
 
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