"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
All of us that are using the Starlight units, here's a place to compare our emulsion testing results.These are just exposure #'s, I haven't tried the on press yet, but will post results when I do:Nova+Diazo:156 mesh: 1:30 .. probably over cooking a bit, but no loss in detail, and no problems even washing out the illustrator 'info' text at the top of the screen.200 mesh: 52 seconds... this seems like the perfect # to wash out halftones down to a 45lpi-2%300 mesh: 30 seconds... might need to do some more dialing in tho, the 55lpi-1% halftones are mostly closed, although they appear to be landing on the mesh itself and not the 'holes'.I didn't have enough coated Nova without diazo screens to play, so I'm waiting on those to dry overnight before trying to shoot them. I'll also coat some screens with SP-1400 to try them.
I should mention that all of our screens are coated with the round edge, 2 strokes (one right after the other) on the shirt side, 1 stroke on the squeegee side. However, as I mentioned in the other starlight thread, I very likely could be overcooking the screens... it seems that even when I am over cooking, there's no ill-effects, or at least none I can determine... (all the detail is still there). Since we do a fair number of discharge shirts, I'd much rather over cook... I suppose I can to start targeting downwards... but really at the end of the day for us, we're exposing screens faster than we can rinse them out, so no big deal.however, on the 200 mesh screens, below 45 seconds and i can certainly start to see the 'haze' of film, vs outside the areas of the film.