Nzoomed
Member
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2012
- Messages
- 1,259
- Format
- 35mm
Let us assume that an old formula, as mentioned by Ferrania themselves, used methyl mercuric iodide or cadmium nitrate. Both possible in products made in Europe (AFAIK at the time), but forbidden in the US. Today, they are forbidden in Europe and the US. This makes manufacture of the product impossible and the sale of a product containing them impossible.
There are grandfathered products that were made by companies that went out of business, that used banned chemicals and are allowed to be sold but not made (again AFAIK).
These are fairy tales made up to show real chemicals in an unreal situation. The fact is that whatever chemicals were used in Ferrania / Scotch products are no longer available or manufactured for one reason or another. So, here is the premise - make a cake with no flour! Too hard, I'll give you the flour and take away the eggs! If you can't do this in 30 mins, you are chopped!
Simple as that. You have to make a product missing a critical ingredient and you have to find a substitute. I hope they do at Ferrania or the product may be quite a bit more like TIP products that we would like.
Now, as for Ektar. Someone earlier said that Ektar was improved - no, it was re-invented using new emulsion and coupler technology and was more akin to the ECN MP negative stock than to any previous C41 product. It now uses a mixed t-grain and cubic grain emulsion. The latter is familiar to my old standby "gencube" with which I have had a lot of experience. Gencube was under development in R&D by an associate many years ago and I was made familiar with it. It did wonders for ECN and now is making Ektar a hit. Add to that, new couplers for improved dark and light keeping and you have a film that no one can touch until the patents expire.
PE
I can see this potentially being an issue with their older B&W films, although their latest E6 and C41 films should be OK, since they only stopped production in the last decade, long after such regulations in the EU came into force.
I know you mentioned that you studied the formula for P30 and said it looked quite similar to a standard B&W formula.
see here https://www.facebook.com/filmferran...0.1414456891./369695133132921/?type=3&theater
Anyway, its all in Italian, and i cant identify any chemical symbols for mercury or cadmium in that photograph, is there anything of concern you can see there?
Of course, there could be more pages to that formula that we cant see. Im unsure when this film was last made, but i think i read somewhere it was finished in the 1980's, i could be wrong though.
Either way, im interested to know if that film used any chamicals that are now banned.