A COMPARISON OF MANUAL AND AUTOMATIC PROCESSING IN GENERAL DENTAL PRACTICE

Although automatic processing is becoming more widely available in gen eral dental practice, there is little objective information regarding the quality of this type of processing. Thus a postal study was undert aken to compare manual and automatic processing using a questionnaire together with a standardised, pre-exposed test radiograph for routine processing. Analysis of variance showed significant differences betwee n the manually processed, automatically processed and control test fil ms, in respect of D Min (P <0.001), test strip (P <0.001), and step de nsity values (P <0.01) but not for D Max (P >0.1). The manually proces sed test films generally had significantly less density than the autom atically processed test films or control test films.