When I was young and wet printing daily I briefly entertained the thought of getting something like this:
Fortunately I came to my senses and did not.
What photographic rabbit hole(s) did you manage to avoid falling down?
Chris
Memories here... Ilford and Agfa had similar machines on the market in the 1980s, in fact Spiratone's may well have been a rebranded or USA-manufactured copy of those.
There were some around even earlier. IIn the late '60s I was a reporter-photographer for a French-language daily newspaper in eastern Canada, which ran on a diesel-fume budget but had a similar contraption. We had a darkroom and I quickly became adept at processing B&W film to final print stage in 60 minutes. Obviously nothing I D&P'd back then would have survived as we fixed the films for 1-2 minutes depending the state of the fixer, and we didn't bother with a refix with the stabilised prints which were hair dryer-dried and raced off to the news room to be scanned into printing plates.
The process was messy and there was a lot of chemical contamination with the rollers. If they were used a lot the machines had to be dismantled and cleaned at least one time every week. There was little to be done about the print contrast, we quickly learned to expose the paper to suit as much as we could and process to a mid grey for the scanning.
I recall Ilford had a brochure with info on the process. It recommended any prints made on FB paper (which oddly in those days was cheaper to buy than the RC brands) to be kept should be refined for the full time and then fully washed. Which we never bothered doing. Inevitably prints if left lying around spare desks in the news room would fade in a few months.
However, I did refix and rewash the films I thought were worth keeping, this on my own free time as I had a key to the building and I would go in on weekends to play in the darkroom, especially in the winter as the building was centrally heated and my family's home wasn't. One often resorted to such tricks in cold climates. Nowadays in Australia we do the same but in air-conditioned buildings. And our films and printing papers live in frost-free fridges.
In the mid-'00s when I made my last visit to the family in eastern Canada I found folders with several hundred rolls of old news event negatives I'd left behind in the attic of our home. Those were given to the provincial museum. For all I know they may well still be in their archives, altho' I've not bothered to enquire about this and likely I never will.
