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AARGHH!! what IDIOTS! AMATEURS and so on...

gandolfi

Member
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Jan 28, 2005
Messages
1,820
Location
Denmark
Format
Large Format Pan
Sorry, but have to rant.

As some of you know, I have for years used the FOMA liquid emulsion, but unfortunately the danish importer stopped his buisness this year..

So - a polish student found a shop in Poland, that have the emulsion - we ordered 15 kg's (!!), and after some time it got here..

Everybody happy.. (for a while).

then the students came to me - one after one - and told me that the emulsion was grey - very grey...

Shi#, I thought. Maybe it had been x rayed in some airport (I wanted it sent on ground), or something else had happened..

then today it came to me.
A student had shown me his bottle (black light proof plastic, containing 1 kg's of emulsion) and I noticed that the lid was blue....:confused:

Why blue, I thought - carried the bottle to the darkroom - unscrew the lis, and held it up against (red) light.....

IT IS NOT LIGHTPROOF!!

WHY - WHY - WHYYYYY would anybody use a transparent lid for light sensible products???

I have never encountered this before - and the only thing I can think of is, that the polish compagny might have got a huge bulk of emulsion, and then re-batched it in these unusable containers...

AMATEURS!!

The question now is, whether I can get my money back (it cost a lot), and whether I can save some of the not melted emulsion, by removing the top layer of allready emulsion before melting the rest (the container looks to be allright).

But I am shocked by this. And mad as hell....

End of rant..
 
emil

can you contact FOMA and ask them what you should do ?

maybe you can exchange the emulsion directly with THEM ?

just wonderin'

john
 
gandolfi said:
WHY - WHY - WHYYYYY would anybody use a transparent lid for light sensible products???
Click to expand...

Because they lack sensibility? (you probably meant light sensitive )

gandolfi said:
But I am shocked by this. And mad as hell....

End of rant..
Click to expand...

I can sympathize with you, it is plain stupid. Reminds me of some other APUG thread where one poster told an anecdote where something like a board of directors of some photo company introduced a new paper product, and one of the people around the table opened it to "admire" the new product... couldn't have been working there long...
 

It was posted by me. The product was film. The company was Kodak. It was supposedly true and told about a new board member from an outside company. Since I didn't go to an board meetings, I had to take the story on faith. It is believable though.

PE
 
ninjarider said:
Hi,
Sorry to hear about your problem with the emulsion. Since you are in Denmark it might be easier to get it from here:

http://www.fomafoto.com

They are in Norway. I haven't used them myself.
Click to expand...

Well, the top lid in the photo of the 1kg canister there certainly isn't blue. It is black, and seems well sealed.

So Emil me indeed have some "repackaged" stuff...

59,60 euro for 1kg :confused: That is dirt cheap! I am surprised, is that price correct??

Marco
 
jnanian said:
emil

can you contact FOMA and ask them what you should do ?

maybe you can exchange the emulsion directly with THEM ?

just wonderin'

john
Click to expand...

hi John - yes, I'll certainly do that.
I honestly doesn't know whether this happened in the Foma store OR in the polish one. I can't believe FOMA would do something this stupid, but on the other hand, the containers are "sealed" (the lid is fixed to the rest as a coke lid on a bottle), and I can't see a small photo shop do that...

It's a mystery.

I know about fomafoto.com - I can get it from there, but the shipping prices from Norway is really high.:rolleyes:

My best choise for the future is to see if I can get the emulsion directly from the factory (they have shown a positive attitude towards this, when asked..)
 

true.

About the price. It is somewhat more expensive than the ones I am used to buy(!!) (FOMA IS cheap), but the price is ok - the shipping price will be high!
 
Speaking of Kodak, I can practically recite this in my sleep:

I'd say that putting it in a non-lightproof container is "defective packaging." Wouldn't you?

I've got to believe that Foma has a similar guarantee on their products.
Look to see if there is a "subsidiary company" clause in their statement too. Hopefully that will cover you against third party negligence.

Regardless, get on the horn and complain.
You are guaranteed to get no satisfaction until you do.
 

It also seems a lot of work for nothing if the Polish intermediate is supposed to have done it, if they are in exactly the same 1kg canisters as in the photo on the shop website... so maybe Foma indeed make a very basic mistake...
 
Marco B said:
Because they lack sensibility?
Click to expand...

I used to work in Germany. One day a package of static sensitive electronic components arrived. With a big red sticker: "Contents are Sensible". Well, I certainly hoped so.

This use of "sensible" seems common in Europe. If you look in a Langenscheidt dictionary it is easy to see how the confusion arises.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Marco B said:
It also seems a lot of work for nothing if the Polish intermediate is supposed to have done it, if they are in exactly the same 1kg canisters as in the photo on the shop website... so maybe Foma indeed make a very basic mistake...
Click to expand...

yes - the more I think of it, the more I think you're right.
The bottles came in the original FOMA cardboard boxes - were sealed, so it seems to originate from FOMA.

I have now written the factory, explaining the problem - now we'll see whether they want to reply..
 
Nicholas Lindan said:
I used to work in Germany. One day a package of static sensitive electronic components arrived. With a big red sticker: "Contents are Sensible". Well, I certainly hoped so.
Click to expand...



Nicholas Lindan said:
This use of "sensible" seems common in Europe. If you look in a Langenscheidt dictionary it is easy to see how the confusion arises.
Click to expand...

If something is not your mother tongue, it is very easy to make such a mistake, I could well have made it myself, and to be honest, it was only when I hit the reply button including the "Quote" option, that I actually noticed the error at all, even though having read the post more than once...
 
Slavomir Polivka said:
Gandolfi

We can deliver materials in Danmark directly to customers. Free of shipping charge. See our main page for information.
Click to expand...

Slavomir: WOW; that was a surprice reply! I didn't know you were in here (but of course you would be..).

I have seen on your page that you can deliver to Copenhagen (and Gøteborg) without shipping charge (?), but I live in the very top of Denmark (much closer to Gøteborg than to Copenhagen).

What then?

(when I order ex liquid emulsion, I normally order at least 10 kg's at a time. Would that be a problem?)

best
emil
 
UPDATE: damage control!

I just made a quick test. I went to the darkroom, and with a plastic tool, I removed gently the top layer (approx 1cm)of emulsion - then I took out a small amount of the remaining emulsion, and applyed it to paper - made a print, and look and behold... It looks like the rest of the emulsion is undamaged.

Thankfully I have been using the FOMA product for many years for my students also, so I have a lot of emty containers; all with BLACK, light proof lids! So now, I "just" have to replace the bad lids with good black ones..

I Still would like to hear more about our norwiegian "connection"! Sounds interesting, as I use other materials all the time..
 
I'm just impressed that at the "end of rant" you were still able to smile!
 
Slavomir,

I think this was supposed to be a gloss surface. I'll try and find the reference:

http://www.timrudman.com/newsletters/view/april-2009-newsletter

'The good news:
Foma show no signs of reducing their range of excellent papers, which lith well. On the contrary, in addition to the recently introduced foma 123, with a surface similar to Agfa MCC they are shortly bringing out Fomatome 133, the Fomatone warm tone emulsion with the MCC-like surface. Freestyle should have this in stock in the next month or so.'

Tom
 
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