Ilford Colour Transparency Films

ILFORD LTD PHOTOFINISHING EQUIPMENT

By 1952 Ilford wanted to launch a new service producing colour prints from transparencies and appointed Jack Coote to establish the new laboratory at Rosedale Road, Richmond and recruit the staff. These must have been exciting times as no automated colour printing equipment existed outside the USA and the assembled team had to design and make the equipment. Bear in mind that in the UK in 1952 most photofinishers were still doing black and white processing and printing by rather uncontrolled manual methods. Black and white projection printers had only just appeared in the UK with introduction of the Kennington and Bourlet Syncromat that Ilford were also marketing.

The Ilford dye bleach material, sometimes referred to as Dye Destruction contained the three complimentary colour dyes and was therefore a very slow material to expose. To compensate a printer was designed around 2¼ kilowatt Xenon arc lamp using a revolutionary rotary filtration method. Filters driven by synchronous motors were introduced into the light beam. The Xenon arc rose in brightness each half cycle to full output and then to extinction at the bottom of each half cycle. The filtration could be adjusted by the rotation of the motor body.

A patent filed by Jack Coote and Philips Jenkins explains this part of the printer. However there were more innovations; any reversal type print process will produce black borders by masking unlike the white borders produced by masking of negative printing processes. The required white border, that was so popular at the time, was created by a second exposure using a metalised glass plate that exposed the border area. In addition the printer was controlled by a five unit coded punched tape probably using a standard Creed Teleprinter punch. The tape was used to programme the printer to adjust the filtration for different transparency materials or batches and to set the number of prints required from each transparency. In the 1960s Hamilton Tait of Penicuik near Edinburgh also used a 5 hole punched tape to control their Kodak S1 printers to print Kodacolor negatives.  "OUT OF THE DARKroom" A short history of the Photofinishing Industry by Peter L M Rockwell and Peter W Knaack describes the modifications that were carried out..

The Ilford printer required two operators one to load in the slides and punch the tape and the other to unload the slides after printing. The innovations continued with the use of daylight loading of the print material using magazines containing 500ft of paper.

In December 1959 a paper was read to a symposium of the RPS on Bulk Production of Colour Prints by Jack Coote and Philip Jenkins entitled "A Machine for High Speed Printing from 35mm Colour Transparencies." The text was published in the RPS Journal of Photographic Science in 1960. In the last paragraph it acknowledges the engineering as being the work of Walter Kennedy of Kennedy Instruments Ltd.