Do airport scanners damage film? – film scanned SIX times tested – shooting with Bronica S2A

These films went through airport scanners six times! ISO range from 100-400… has it had any effect?

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough for an employer to send me to the stunning country of Costa Rica for four weeks. I packed up my trusty Yashica 635 and packed a load of films into a bag, and headed for the airport.

Sadly the job I was doing turned out to be just crazy, I didn’t have a moment to think, let alone get out to shoot some film.

I forgot all about the film in my camera bag. Three weeks into the trip I suddenly realised that all of those films had been through the airport scanners FOUR times already. My bag got scanned and rescanned and Heathrow, scanned and rescanned in Miami. And not once did it occur to me that the films were in there! What can I say… I was pretty tired with all that travel, and I am not good at sleeping on airplanes!

Once I had realised that all the films had been scanned four times already, I figured it was too late. And I was interested to see what effect, if any, the scanners had on the films. So I decided to travel back with them in my hand-carried camera bag again, let them go through the scanners a few more times, and then get out and shoot them when I got back.

My bag was scanned once in San Jose, as we left, then at least once in Miami again as we transitted. I don’t remember it being scanned again there, but I was half asleep again, so it may actually be seven scans. But let’s call it six.

Six scans, and I saw no effect on the film. They do say that film below ISO1600 should be fine, so I wasn’t expecting huge differences. But I thought maybe that an ISO400 film being scanned six times might do some damage. But nothing that I can see!

So whilst I wouldn’t recommend throwing your films through the scanners at every airport, I can say that with whatever scanners I went through, they did no damage at all.

That said, if you manage to stay awake enough on your travels to remember that you are carrying tons of film… you can always as the TSA guys, or whoever, to hand check your films. Mixed reports on this online, sometimes they agree, sometimes they don’t! But at least if you’re carrying ISO400 film or slower, you can be fairly confident that the films are going to be ok. I think….