I'm not even going to get into all this other stuff, but I will go back to Charlie's post about Pro Copy and SO132 in particular...Commercial Film was discontinued about 3 years ago...SO-132 was slated to be gone last year, but that Photo Techniques article may have a hand in it's second gasp of life... (don't quote me, but it's a mighty "coincidence" that their article of it came out after it was first discontinued and then reinstated....). Pro Copy is the one to mourn...it's the one & only "unique" copy film out there...(posted 8128 days ago)But SO-132?? I've used this off & on for years to dupe old nitrate negs with various results....our state archives quit using the earlier version of this film decades ago, as did most other institutions because it had really poor storage characteristics...even SO-132 has to be processed just *right* to last....SO-132 is not used in preservation reformatting in most archives. They favor a 2 step duplication using a pan film like the now discontinued Agfa n330p or Delta 100, then they contact the interpositive master over to an ortho film like Commercial Film, or Ilford Ortho Plus. This is the way the big labs do the acetate & nitrate neg duping programs....the interpositive becomes the master, the dupes become the surrogates....furthermore SO-132 isn't used because the curve of the film makes it a poor match for negs older than the mid 60's. I have used it on old, old nitrate negs going back to the early teens and it's like pulling teeth trying to get a good dupe out of it...I thought it was just me, until I spoke with some lab techs at bigger institutions and they told me how to do it the 2-step way....when I told them of SO-132 being discontinued, everyone I talked with (at 3 places) said "good riddens"....what's more, the old dupes from our archives, that were done back in the early 70's on the predecessor?? They have suffered even in a cold storage vault....printing these negs is anything but fun.....
Me?? I did run out and stockpile SO-132 about 2 years ago when it was first discontinued...I was trying to dupe about 350 nitrate negs, and bought enough to finish the project. Agfa made a similar film years ago, but discontinued it as well....when I talked with Kodak about it, they said their biggest customers were commercial labs, and scanners have done away with the sales of copy and dupe films....so see? Not even institutions like the Library of Congress or NARA can order enough to justify these films...Pro Copy was one of the films used for HABS work for copying old prints....Pro Copy was also used for interpositives and neg duping, because it worked like a built-in highlight mask...
Now did we use it here? NO, we use a couple of cases of TMX each year. Does our archives use it? not much, they use TMX and PXP, but since we're both about 100 yrs old, we have alot of other emulsions back in the files....Archives does much more copywork than we do...a busy week for us is about 100 sheets of film. They do that in a day or even two, three times that. They have 1.5 million negs and growing....and if you look at every state run archive for gov't records, and think of film use in preservation reformatting...you'd think that would be enough of a market....but it's not and never has been.
Then on a completely different note, look at Dupont Mylar D...the best product for film & print storage as far as plastics goes? Same for encapsulation?? It was discontinued last year as well....it was made for the graphics industry and digital has phased it out as well....only you'd think companies like Light Impressions etc. would be enough to keep it in demand...not so...the Library of Congress is testing replacements now....look at catalogs and count the number of products made with this product....
a sign of the times.....Opinions expressed in this message may not represent the policy of my agency.