The rumours about Jobo are unsubstantiated. Their website shows no press releases since 2010 and no new products in the B&H catalog since then swell. They look to be a 2nd tier re-brand of digital-centric products from a Taiwan manufacturing house.
Hey man, your problem is you are listening too much to rumours and nonsense talk on internet forums.
Their factory is not so far away from me. They have divided the company: One part concentrating on digital accesoires, and the traditional part which is producing the film equipment.
And the film equipment part of Jobo is doing well. As said before, they have even restarted production of some products due to increasing demand.
BW film has its problems as well due to loss of demand.
There have been official statements from Ilford, Kodak, Maco/Rollei and Adox that their BW film sales have either stabilised or are even increasing.
Looks like we see a reversed trend at first in BW.
Now we have to do our part to work for such situation with slide film, too.
I think it is possible, but we all have to do our part.
Shooting much more slide film and get other photographers interested in it.
I am doing it here in my home town with success.
Once young photographers have seen my slides projected with my excellent projection lenses on my big screen they are hooked!
They have never seen such excellent quality!
It is completely impossible for digital shots and beamers to compete, because of the extremely low resolution of beamers (only in the 1-4 MP range) and their bad color reproduction.
Machine wet processing ad RA printing is an endangered species, so much so that Fuji had no systems available for display and no product updates at the last Expo, and none planned for Photokina 2012.
A friend of mine is working in the photo finishing business: RA-4 sales of Fuji is increasing. Dry systems cannot compete in mass production: Neither in quality, and not at all in costs.
You can get a 9x13cm RA-4 print here from CeWe or Fuji for 1 Cent.
That is completely impossible with dry printing.
They plan for many years to come with RA-4. They are market leader.
As a guy who spent years working in that system where I signed the purchase orders for mini-labs, that's the perspective I bring. Good luck.
We Europeans can only shake our head with the "fetish" North Americans have with local mini-labs.
All this "the sky is falling because my local minilab has closed".
Film became a mass medium without that minilab system.
Minlabs arrived in the 80ies, when film has been established with the masses for decades.
Minilabs played only a minor role here in Europe. By far most of all the colour film business has been handled by the mass labs and the drug store chains. And that is still the case.
And now clever professional labs with excellent mail ordering are gaining market share, too.
And self developing at home is increasing, too.
Cheers, Jan
