You keep posting that Bill, but I don't think its true. I asked the vendors at the camera market in Shanghai, and they said the film is still being produced.
In Shanghai, ERA is 10 RMB a roll ($1.61), Lucky is ($1.30). ERA is better in every respect... its quite fine grained in XTOL, and the tones are great!
Produced is not the same word as
manufactured. They are playing cute with the words.
If I make widgets and I go out of business, but someone buys all my left-over widgets and puts them in new packages, they can perhaps claim to be producing my widgets long after I stopped making them. They cannot claim to be manufacturing my widgets, because they're not.
The good part is, if stocks still exist and your retailers 'produce' them, then you can still get it. The bad part is, the existing stocks are finite and when they are gone, they are gone.
I quoted the news article that clearly stated that Lucky was no longer going to manufacture photo-sensitive materials, that was a year ago. I have personally dealt with Shantou ERA when I was briefly importing it into the USA a couple years back, and THEY told me that ERA was no longer manufacturing photographic film.
I have no interest in lying. Your retailers have every interest in not telling the truth, they want to continue to sell their existing stocks.
However, I have noted the continued insistence of some to continue to believe what they wish to be true, such as the people who continued to state that Agfa film was being manufactured again, despite the factory having been torn down and hauled off as rubble, or the people who continued to state firmly that Forte was on the verge of reopening its doors. I guess desperate people will believe all sorts of nonsense.
