All, There are generally two types of x-ray machines in use at airports, and in addition, there are metal detection devices. The metal detectors will not detect plastic. This is an advantage to photographers. Details in a few paragraphs. The two X-ray machines are: 1) Low power, for checking carry-on baggage. Will damage ALL film, given enough passes through the machine. X-ray damage accumulates. Each pass through the machine adds to the damage. Slower films will not show signs of damage until they've been through the machine many times. There are warning signs at US airports stating that films faster than 800 ISO should not be exposed to this X-ray. In the US it is your RIGHT (so stated on the signs near the inspection point) to have your film hand-inspected. This right exists in the US ONLY. 2) High-power, variable intensity. This machine is new, and is used for inspecting checked-in baggage. It WILL damage ALL films. Kodak has published warnings about it. They have a page on their web site describing its use and giving examples of the type of damage one can expect from having film exposed to it. Their advice is to NEVER put film in your checked-in baggage. The best solution I've found is to reduce all my film materials to plastic. For 35mm, I take my commercially packaged film (metal cassette) into my darkroom and transfer it into plastic cassettes that are used for loading bulk film. These are then replaced into the snap-top canisters that come inside the film box. My 120 roll film is removed from the plastic/foil packages that come inside the box/pro-pack and place them into canisters I make by mating two 35mm canisters (details on request). All my film is reduced to plastic. I can now (I've already tried it, sucessfully) carry all my film in my pockets and walk through the metal detector. No alarm, no X-ray, no obnoxious rent-a-cops. This should work world-wide. Best regards, Stew -- Photo Web pages: http://www.inficad.com/~gstewart UNIX: It's not just 'User-Unfriendly', it's 'Proactively User-Hostile'! Nothing generates so much silence as confronting a person with an undeniable truth which is contrary to that person's beliefs. Manual cameras, Luna-Pro's and stick shifts.
