[Leica] APX & Fomapan at Freestyle

[leica at rcmckee.com (R. Clayton McKee)]

On 23 Mar 2006 at 11:42, Arche, Harvey wrote:



> I just ordered 10 rolls each of  APX  100 & Fomapan 200 from 
Freestyle.
> The sales guy on the phone says they ordered a half million rolls 
of APX
> just before Agfa went belly up. The interesting thing is that he 
swears
> the Arista II line of films is the exactly the same stock with 
different
> packaging, and a buck per roll cheaper. The same deal with the 
Fomapan
> line, which Freestyle packages as Arista.edu.
> 
> Is this too good to be true?


Possibly so.  When I was doing lab work, we had a major client who 
used Freestyle as their primary supplier, and on one memorable batch 
of a dozen rolls of Arista 400, which they swore were all ordered at 
the same time and came in the same lot, and which DID have the same 
labels on them, we had rebate markings for two lots of Agfa 400, 
HP5+, two lots of Ilford Universal 400, and three separate lot 
numbers of something labelled "Ilford FT" which, when I called 
Paramus from curiosity, turned out to be "Field Trial" film - test 
emulsions which were never supposed to have made it out into the 
"light of day" anyhow.  Apparently at that time (which was about a 
dozen years ago now) Freestyle was picking up odds and sods of 
whatever was cheap and repackaging it.  They may have changed that.

They all came out usable in a standard TMaxRS developer run, and our 
client never noticed the difference, but it put me off private brands 
forever.... "usable" being a somewhat lower standard than I prefer.
--


R. Clayton McKee                           http://www.rcmckee.com
Photojournalist                               rcmckee@rcmckee.com
P O Box 571900                           voice/fax   713/783-3502
Houston, TX 77257-1900                   cell phone #  on request