SENSITOMETRIC AND IMAGE QUALITY PERFORMANCE OF RAPID INTRAORAL FILM PROCESSING TECHNIQUES

A number of products are available to dentists for the rapid productio n of intraoral radiographic films but there is little information on t heir relative merits. This study evaluated the performance of five ''r apid'' film processing products commonly used by British dentists in c omparison with standard Kodak manual processing. Two Perspex contrast- detail test objects were made in order to investigate threshold contra st. Film speed, film gradient, limiting resolution and threshold contr ast results are presented. Rapid processing systems possessed lower fi lm speed when compared with Kodak Ektaspeed film and standard Kodak pr ocessing. The speed of E-speed film was found to be lower than that of D-speed film when used with Westone ''Rapid X-ray'' processing. Overa ll image quality was generally similar for all film/processing combina tions evaluated, with the exception of Nix QP which gave markedly poor er image quality.