Now I'm wondering if the Fuji stamp says best before 2021, or best before 2021.7 on your box.
Or ist it
Best before: 2021
Code: 1
Number: NN91 1
My Number NN91 would seem to be higher than your NM01. But then 2021.7 for your expiration and 2021.1 for mine wouldn't make sense!
In my box there were two notes with correction factors. For C41 and a different set for CN16. They were non-zero.
I'm also making progress with the Densitometry, I hope. I have an X-Rite Colormunki Photo, which I bought a good while ago to profile my screens. But the hardware is a full featured spectrophotometer. The sensor can be placed into different positions to take spot readings from a surface (emission, transmission and reflectance) and two more positions that resemble an external light meter with and without diffusion dome. So I can also take ambient light readings (basically an incident light meter reading) or a directed emission reading (basically a reflectance reading on the light meter).
Each reading records a full visible light spectrum. On the PC I use it with the open source Argyl CMS and the open source DisplayCal gui for Argyl. But the author of Argyl is also selling an android app for mobile use of the supported devices with an Android device. This way I could check the response of my Kodak filters and actually take a set of densitometric readings of my Fuji reference strip. The app can calculate the response of any Status-M/A/T/E, Visual and others. I could have them all displayed at the same time. Its really amazing.
The response of some filters looks more like Status M, others like Status-A.
Anyway, reading the reference strip again with the Colormunki the Status-M red channel was almost the same as measured with my b/w Densi + Kodak Red filter. The blue a bit different but the green quite different.
Could you send me your readings of your reference strip from your X-Rite densi? It might be helpful to verify my readings?
About your problems of Dmin and Contrast running contrary. According to Fuji you can increase contrast through increased circulation, which should not increase Dmin. They say. I sent you the Fuji Manual and the control stip notice via PM.