TX Bulk Discontinued

Tom A said:
Great sigh of relief from me! I still dont trust Kodak further than I can throw an empty filmbox! But it at least gives me some respite in stocking Tri X. Just paid for 4000ft of XX yesterday. It will arrive in a week or so. Now, a similar amount of Tri X would keep me safe for at least a year. Time to dust off the IXMOO cassettes and load up a couple of hundred of them and line up the M2's!
I have just a couple of Nikon cassettes to finish with Agfapan 400S. Not my favourite film as it scans rather badly. Lots of corrections in Lightroom to make it look decent.
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4000 feet of Tri-x in 1 year!!! 😱 Wow, I really ought to shoot more. Do you develop it all yourself too? I know that you are a pro and photography is you lifestyle but, wow, I never imagined pro's going through that much film in a year.
 
I dont do commercial work anymore. My shooting these days is strictly for my own pleasure and also for testing Rapidwinders, lenses,cameras etc. Having shot for a living for decades, you start developing a rather haphazard view on film. It is a bit like putting gas in the car. Without it is just a lump of metal (be it a car or a M2). When you think about it, 4000 ft is not that much. Each roll of 36-37 exposures is 5.5 feet long, so 4000 ft is only a bit more than 600 rolls!
I do process my own stuff. It would be absurdly expensive to have it done outside - particularly if it is for your benefit. Part of the reason is that I am forever looking for that "holy grail" of the perfect developer. There are times when I feel like an actor in Hamlet's "McBeth". "Eye of newt, sweat of mare and stir well". I make my own developers from scratch. Sometimes they are concoctions from Steve Anchells "The Darkroom Cook Book" series and sometimes they are my own ideas. So far that Holy Grail has eluded me, but I persist - mainly because it is fun!
 
So how many freezers do you have there Tom ? Must admit, I was tempted to buy up a 'few' rolls just in case but missus says food is kinda important as well...go figure 😉
 
I feel silly to admit this, but hearing that Tri-X might be discontinued seriously bummed me out--like learning that an old friend was very sick.

Glad to hear that the patient was never in the hospital at all.
 
troym said:
I feel silly to admit this, but hearing that Tri-X might be discontinued seriously bummed me out--like learning that an old friend was very sick.
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There are also worrying rumours concerning Uncle Kodachrome, but happily he does seem to linger on. Says I, sounding sad, although I only shoot about four rolls of the stuff a year. I have been (intermittently) using Kodachrome since before I developed my first film, which was Agfachrome in a room-temperature development kit - black-and-white came along later. Very odd.
 
The good thing about all of this is that Kodak is getting constant "strong responses" from people who still shoot film. More of that should be happening to "remind" them, IMHO 😀

Btw, Earl, in the email you got:

"It's particularly unfortunate given that people feel so strongly about Tri-X and that was evidenced by the angry reaction you received when you posted the (incorrect) information online.."

This Audrey reads RFF ??
 
Well funny you ask Sitemistic..

The power went out while we were away earlier this year, we came home to a very warm and 'funky' freezer. We had a nice stash of legs of lamb, edamame, salmon etc which all had to be pitched<sob>. Of course, the film survived and is back in the freezer in it's rightful place 😉

I really should get a freezer just for film and paper shouldn't I ?
 
Will: I had told her about the posting, so she was just referring to my statement. When I posted the correction here, I emailed her and gave her the URL for the thread. So maybe she reads it now, I dunno.

Newsgrunt: Naw, just eat fresh. Film can keep; you can go to the market daily for food. 😀
 
shadowfox said:
This Audrey reads RFF ??
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Somehow, I don't find it a bit odd that an employee of Kodak might ALSO be an amateur photographer, perhaps even a fan of rangefinder cameras 🙂
 
The beauty of 400 ft cans of XX is that it does not take up too much room. I can stack most of the freezer with XX and XXX. In the summertime I use up a couple of extra reels to make room for ice-cream. Living within walking distance from a variety of food stores, we shop for fresh stuff daily. This is the european in us that comes out. If you live in a city, why bother filling your place with stuff, when the store can store it for you.
Turns out that Kodak still has Plus X moviestock so I did order a 400ft can of that too. Might keep it cold until next summer though, 125 asa is a bit slow for North West gloom. I havent used that emulsion for a long time. Used to be very good, but slow!
 
amateriat said:
Break out the wine glasses and brandy snifters, guys and gals...I guess Rochester really wasn't that dumb after all. Now all we have to do is convince 'em not to kill off HIE for at least the next couple o' years and we'd be set. Maybe have 'em run a batch annually, like Konica did with their 750 IR film. Just a thought...

(Hold it...the company that was making film for Konica is still cranking the stuff out. Might need to make some contacts there...)

- Barrett
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As I wrote elsewhere, there are not one but two IR films available from German manufacturers, the Rollei IR 400 and efke IR 820 (well, the efke films are made in Croatia). The latter is fairly close to HIE in IR sensitivity and other charasteristics, and I am sure somebody will start to import it to the US after HIE is gone. You can find further info here:

http://www.retrophotographic.com/

Just look under "film" and you will found both efke and Rollei branded products. I do not know if retro photographic in the UK ships to the US, but Fotoimpex in Germany does: http://www.fotoimpex.de/anglicus/HOWTOORDER/HOWTOORDER.html
 
We try to buy same day if we can but sometimes when there's a great buy on something, well like film, I gotta stock up yano 😉

Having a T&T ( huge Chinese supermarket chain in Canada) open up on the way home from work is great for produce, although some of it does come all the way from China.

Tom, I thought Super XX was end of lifed or is there another name it goes by for the film industry ?
 
The Double XX or Super XX is the same film under various names. I suspect that the Double XX is the movie stock designation for the old "camera" Super XX. It is still being made (or Kodak has huge inventory of it) as it is freely available from the Kodak Motion Picture Division (as is evidently Plus X in 400 ft cans!). I treat the XX as "slower" XXX. Rate it @250 and cut 1 minute off the D-76 1:! times.
It is reasonably fine grained, a bit smoother than Tri X but really not enough tp quibble about. The latest incarnation has some kind of "low drag" coating on it which makes it quite slippery. It was after all designed to be feed through a 35mm movie camera system at 24 frames/minute.
I am just using up the last of the APX 400S (did 5 rolls tonight in Crawley's FX 37 - so far the only developer that seems to work well with it). Just have to finish the 10 rolls in the Nikon reloadable cassettes and then start spooling up XX (180 rolls in Leica IXMOO's and about 30 rolls in Nikon cassettes). That should keep me shooting until mid to late January at least.
 
Tom, I must say that I'm in awe of your industriousness (not to mention your prolific output!).

Since the household 'fridge here is quite chock-full o' edible goods (that's just how we do things here), I'm likely going to get a mini-'fridge for my film needs; quite modest by your standards, but hopefully adequate for my purposes. 🙂


- Barrett
 
Barrett: Here's how you do it. You keep putting film in the food fridge until the missus (or domestic partner 😉 ) gets fed up and buys the film fridge for you. Worked like a charm for me! 😀
 
If your film stock is bl/w (Tri X/XX and slower stuff) the freezing or cold storage is only really necessary if you intend to keep the film for several years. I have found that there is very little if any difference in film stored ("lost") in the darkroom and the one stored in the fridge/freezer.
As for trying to fill the fridge and get a bonus film fridge! Wont work in our household. We both regard the kitchen with the same awe as early explorers looked upon the white areas of Africa!
Many years ago we changed the flooring in the kitchen and this involved sliding the stove out and disconnecting it. OK, new floor in and the stove back in position. A couple of years later I needed to dry some paint in the oven. Damned stove would not go on. I looked behind and there was the power cord nicely rolled up! Hey. microwave ovens and toaster ovens are smaller and more efficient anyway (except for drying paint).
 
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