Response to Best film/dev for copy negatives?

Conrad, I've done a fair amount of this, mainly duping old nitrate negatives, using Kodak Professional B/W Duping film- SO-132. This is a one-step continuous tone Ortho film, with the speed of Azo pretty much. You can get it in sheets starting at 4x5. Most of the negs that I'm working on are usually from old roll film cameras, so I've used this stuff mainly by contacting the film emulsion to emulsion. But, it is possible to enlarge onto it as well. It's just pretty slow. I use an old (modified) Burke & James contact printer for this, but in your case, you should be able to get by with an enlarger. If you have some Azo on hand, you can use this to get an idea of what your exposure might be. I use DK-50 in a tank to dev. this stuff, and follow up with selenium toning the film for permanence. This last step is optional, but earlier versions of this film had some stability problems with repeated light exposures, so if you were doing this for a long term use, you might want to tone them (as any neg. really). The current tech. sheet from Kodak lists D-76, and Xtol times as well. You can also do it in 2 steps, although people used to use Super-XX pan, or Commercial film for this. I suppose you could try Ilford Ortho if you wanted to go this route. I suggest you try to get a copy of Kodak's "Copying & Duplicating in B/W and Color". This is a great book, and covers all this in detail. Agfa made a duping film as well, but I think that's been discontinued too. I'm sure people will tell you to do this digitally, but it is possible to make a fine dupe the old fashioned way too. Let me know if you have any questions.

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