Washable Lint Roller cheap alternative for Particle Transfer Roller?

I’ve never seen those particular rollers. My concern would be with the level of stickiness. For PTRs there are two common types. Kodak refers to them as “matte” and “shiny” – the matte ones are the ones I’ve seen on all film scanners that have PTRs. The shiny ones are significantly more tacky, and caused issues when we tried to use them on our 70mm scanner. We switched back to the matte ones. Static will always be an issue with PTRs, especially if the ambient humidity is low and you’re winding fast.

That being said, a PTR shouldn’t really be looked at as a cleaning device. Its primary purpose is to remove incidental surface dust. If your scans had noticeable dirt on them, odds are it was caked on gunk that built up over the years. A PTR won’t work on that.

If your film is really dirty, your best bet is to just hand-clean it. You can do this with specialized film cleaner (please don’t use stuff like Film Renew or film guard, which mostly just coats the film in oils that make a terrible mess of any machine you run it through (and will damage your PTRs if you go that route too). We get film treated with this stuff and we clean it off before we run it through the machine because it makes a mess.

99.95% Isopropyl Alcohol works well. Don’t use anything less pure though as it will contain water. Just get some Pec Pads, soak them in alcohol and wind the film through it, changing the position on the pad frequently as as you see it starts to get dirty. You could also use perchloroethylene but please, please wear a respirator and gloves if you do and work in a very well ventilated space. It’ll do a great job of cleaning but it’s a really nasty solvent.

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