A comparison of manual and automatic processing in general dental practice.

Although automatic processing is becoming more widely available in general dental practice, there is little objective information regarding the quality of this type of processing. Thus a postal study was undertaken to compare manual and automatic processing using a questionnaire together with a standardised, pre-exposed test radiograph for routine processing. Analysis of variance showed significant differences between the manually processed, automatically processed and control test films, in respect of D Min (P < 0.001), test strip (P < 0.001), and step density values (P < 0.01) but not for D Max (P > 0.1). The manually processed test films generally had significantly less density than the automatically processed test films or control test films.