Has anyone heard about, or experimented with, using a direct-from-transparency paper (such as Ektachome Radiance III) as film. I have a source of a few 8x10 sheets & some old but good chemicals (so they say!) and was considering trying it out, making some 4x5 'film' out of the 8x10s. I wonder what the 'ISO rating' of the paper might be?

Cheers

It will take a bit of experiementation to get the filtering right as the paper is balanced for quartz light, but the speed shouldn't be too bad, although an 85B does drop it some what.
You should be able to get very close with two sheets of 8x10 paper cut down to 4x5. The first set expose in two stop increments ie, 3, 12, 50, 200. That will give you either a dead on exposure or where the exposure is inbetween two of 'em. Next series by half stops. If the right exposure fell in between 12 and 50, then 18,25,32,48.

If this is type C paper for making prints from slides, you will not get a negative on the paper, but a positive. Ready made prints! I have seen Ilfochrome exposed in pinhole cameras. Without filtration, you can get some really unusual false colors. Pretty cool! It would certainly be fun to play with.

Some readers may remember the "Fotochrome" camera of the 1950s, which used Ansco "Printon" Type R material in rolls to make color prints by direct exposure. The camera incorporated a mirror to revert the image.

Photostat cameras similarly used a prism or mirror in front of the lens, when making a "first print" of a document.

Someone, I think Auto-Photo, made picture-in-a-minute booths that used "Cibachrome" paper in a similar manner, a quarter-century later.

Polaroid's integral films, starting with the "SX-70" material, also worked in cameras fitted with those internal mirrors.

This may be something to keep in mind when experimenting with "Ektachrome" paper -- especially if plans include taking pictures of scenes with letters or numbers in them!

Wasn't this reversal true also of the early Daguerreotypes? This would be problematic in portraiture!

Indeed it was, and also of the lamented "minute tintype." If you rephotographed the original (which was the only way to reproduce it), the copies came out "right reading."