On our trip to Europe this year, I didn’t realize until it was too late that the Indianapolis airport has installed CT scanners in security. My backpack went through with ten rolls of film in a plastic box, plus one roll already in a camera.
Conventional wisdom is that a CT scanner will ruin your film, but that the older X-ray scanners generally won’t.
Yet only the images already on the takeup spool in the camera were ruined. The rest of the film — three rolls of Fujicolor 200 and eight of Kodak T-Max 100 — turned out fine.
Here’s what one of the ruined images looks like. It came out of my Reto Ultra Wide and Slim.
Perhaps the metal 35mm canisters provided some protection to the film inside. I don’t know. I’m just glad the rest of my images worked out. Here’s another image from the Reto UWS on Fujicolor 200. This is Sans-Souci, a summer house of Frederick the Great, in Potsdam, Germany.
It’s possible that the CT scanners did degrade this film somewhat, but not so much that normal exposure and development wouldn’t produce good results.
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