I would, first of all, respond as honestly as I could, regardless of whether it made a particular product look good or not so good. Second, if I wasn't fully informed on the specifics, I'd ask someone in the company who was before responding. Unfortunately, in most corporate settings, customers service reps are under pressure to hurry things along, and often are at the low end of the totem pole when it comes to actual experience. But among the numerous overlapping layers of career I myself held for quite awhile, I did serve people with technical advice as well as specific products which were mainly chosen by myself too, as one of the key buyers for that company. Holding the purse strings, we had a "zero BS" policy. Any sales representative approaching us with a product line was given one warning and then the boot if they didn't do their homework first. But instead, when it was me needing to directly reach out to any given manufacturer for the truth, it could take a lot of work getting past all the marketing types to someone in a true industrial position who might actually be in the know, like a key engineer or chemist. And if competent honest individuals just weren't there, and securely there as permanent staff, well, then that company was just plain scratched off the list.
I'm not suggesting that the person at Ilford was being dishonest. Ilford is a class act, but relatively small and perhaps understaffed. But they were serving up a quickie answer based on certain assumptions which overlook a number of real-world variables. Maybe older filter inventory on their own shelves still looked fine; who knows? Over the years, I've learned to test every product for myself to learn the truth; but I was not only paid to do that, but was outright given all kinds of things by manufacturers, even prototypes, to test, and at one point, even had enough personal energy left over to publish comparison results in relevant trade magazines. None of that was photo related, but was analogous in approach. The photo magazines didn't pay enough to make it worth my time. But the amount of BS out there is amazing large either way.
Just like there are a lot of web jockeys these days, back then there were pro writers who had to do several feature articles a month to make a living. Where did they have the time to seriously research or test anything? They didn't. Consumer Reports was one of the worst. That's why forums like this one where people can get real world feedback from one another are important. Sure, a lot still has to be sifted and sorted out; but it's way better than a corporate snow job.
In this overall thread, one can easily discern a serious manufacturer like Cree due to the quality and detail of their specification pages. It's not like walking into Home Depot or Wal Mart and seeing some too good to be true color quality rating on the package of some dirt cheap import LED or CFL residential bulb. GE has pretty much gotten out of lighting by now; but when they were a major player there were two distinction divisions. The Pro Lighting division offered plenty of specs like real spectrograms for these high quality products, with no BS, while the Consumer Lighting division had nothing but BS and mainly junk bulbs - even their trade show salesmen were habitual liars. After awhile, one can almost smell the difference.
