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16 Aug 2002
US researchers reveal a new silver-free photographic medium set to rival traditional film.
Scientists at Polaroid have come up with a new one-step process for creating color prints. The team says its new photographic medium is suitable for many printing applications including the generation of sharp, high-resolution color prints from digital images. (Science Express 10.1126 1074583)
Traditional film development processes use light to turn silver halide crystals into grains of metallic silver producing a negative. After development, any remaining silver halide crystals are washed off the negative using chemicals.
Now, John Marshall and his co-workers from Polaroid, have used acid as a substitute for silver halide. The acid is produced when the photographic film is exposed to light.
The team says that the acid is then converted into a visible image using dyes, which are dispersed throughout three layers in the image-forming sheet. These dyes are colorless in their neutral form but are activated by the acid to turn blue, green or red resulting in a full-color image.
Marshall and colleagues call this process acid-amplified imaging (AAI). The entire technique takes place on a single-sheet of film and eliminates the need for conventional wet chemical processing.
Potentially, one of AAI's biggest advantages is that it can produce high-resolution images, whereas in conventional photography, the resolution limit is predetermined by the size of the silver halide crystals.
Marshall says that medium can be exposed by lasers, digitial light-valve projection systems and organic-light emitting diode arrays. The authors say that "a wide variety of applications are conceivable, ranging from digital printing of transparent or reflective images to in-situ formation of color filters for liquid crystal displays".
Author
Jacqueline Hewett is news reporter on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
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