Film is expensive and getting more so, which has pushed a lot of photographers toward a trick that predates the shortage: photographic paper is light-sensitive too. It’s slow, its response is nothing like film’s, and it gives you a paper negative — but it’s cheap, it’s still in production, and you can develop it in trays you already own.
The obstacle has always been mechanical. A 35mm camera doesn’t care what emulsion you’ve loaded, but it absolutely cares about sprocket holes. Jon Schiereck’s hand-cranked perforator, written up on September 11, 2026, solves that with a 3D printer and a pair of ruined drill bits.
The mechanism
The punches are two drill bits ground down until their cutting geometry produces clean circular holes at the correct spacing — a nice piece of improvisation, since a proper matched punch-and-die set in that size is both expensive and hard to source. A rubber roller advances the paper strip between punches, keeping hole pitch consistent along the length. The whole thing runs off a crank driven through gears, turned by hand or, if you have a lot of stock to get through, chucked into a cordless drill.
Everything but the bits, the roller, and the fasteners is printed.
Schiereck is also developing a printable slitter to cut 35mm-width strips from larger sheets, which closes the remaining gap — right now you need paper already at the correct width, and darkroom paper is not sold that way. With both machines, an 8×10 sheet becomes several rolls.
Why bother
Two reasons, and they’re different people’s reasons.
For cost: a box of RC paper against a roll of film is not a close comparison, especially for anyone learning a camera, testing a newly-repaired body, or shooting volume they don’t intend to keep.
For the look: paper negatives are their own aesthetic, not a degraded imitation of film. Extremely low ISO forces long exposures or bright light. Paper is blue-sensitive and effectively blind to red, so skies blow out white and warm tones go dense — the tonal signature of very early photography, for the same physical reason. And you scan or contact-print the negative to invert it, which adds another generation of texture.
Notably, you never need a developing tank: you process it in open trays under safelight, watching the image appear, like any darkroom print.
The plans are free on Schiereck’s Ko-fi.