Group buy of C41 chemistry in Australia / South Australia?

Hey all,

I've been buying my C41 from Macodirect but they no longer ship interesting liquids to Australia. You can maybe still get the Fuji Press kit from Ag Photo in the UK but with shipping, you're looking at probably $160 for 80 rolls.

I think it's time to consider organising an APUG group buy of pro-lab quantities (about 40L of each replenisher) of chemistry and split it up between a handful of members. If we can get a multiple of 2 or 4 people (due to how the bottles are bundled) willing to buy a few litres each, we should be set. Personally I just need C41 at the moment as I have loads of RA4 chemistry and have stopped doing E6 but there's no reason why we couldn't also buy those other chemicals if there were sufficient demand within the group of buyers to hit the min purchase quantity.

There seem to be two main suppliers, at least for Kodak stuff:
- APS, MOQ ~$500 of Flexicolor SM (they sent me their current price list, I can share it via email if you PM me)
- Dead Link Removed (I haven't tried contacting them yet)

I would much prefer LU/LORR over SM for replenishment, capacity & value-for-money reasons; APS seems to only have SM though.

Has anyone dealt with either of these companies? Have suggestions for other Australian photolab-chemistry distributors that are worth talking to?

More importantly, who is interested in possibly joining me in a group buy later this year, and what quantity would you hypothetically be in for?

I see a note they can no longer ship the 5 litre kit outside Eu due to air freight restriction, but there is a new 2.5 litre kit with no similar restriction mentioned on its description.
Would 2.5 liter kits be enough for you?

Interesting - seems it's a total-quantity restriction then. I tend to buy the 1L dev concentrates though, which means a typical package contains about 6L of concentrates rather than the 3.5L in a 5L kit. None of the 1L individual bottles has the "no shipping" limitation so maybe they just won't notice in aggregate I doubt it though.

Still, if I can buy it cheaper locally then that would be great. Even buying huge quantities from maco, I pay as much for shipping as I do for the chemicals.

You might find a Minilab operator in Australia that would be willing to tack an APUG group buy onto the end of its next order.

What's your projected cost per roll?

I'd be interested in c41 if it was a 4 bath variant. Shipping to tassie might be a pain though. IPS have their catalogue and prices on their website. The prices are on the high side though so it'd depend on what sort of deal/discount could be done as to whether or not it's worth it. I'm not sure if they have the lu/lorr stuff as i haven't looked for it - i was eyeing some endura paper at the time.

hoffy said:

What's your projected cost per roll?

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The reason I develop my own has little to do with cost - it is mostly related to quality.
The last time I had 5x4 C41 sheets developed by Bondcolor (a supposedly professional outfit) what I got back were very dirty and in a couple of cases, exhibited uneven development across the sheet - at about $5 per sheet. It didn't take me long to decide to develop my own and then to make up my own solutions. I've never been sorry.

That said, the cost of most developing kits in Australia make it more expensive to develop your own. If a group get together and buy minilab supplies and split them up, you'll come out at no more than 75% of the cost per roll of getting them done commercially and probably a lot less than that.

You'd want to get supplies for a 4-bath process though. Photoengineer has made the point often enough that you don't want to use a blix and blix supplies don't store as well as separate bleach and fixer. I recently opened a bottle of bleach that had been stored for more than 10 years. It needed careful filtering but worked fine after that. Fixer can store just as well, so can stabiliser. You'd want to use developer pretty quickly (within weeks) after mixing - I've found that it's good to use if it hasn't darkened deeper than a light honey color. But then I scan my negs and correct the scans in PhotoShop. If you're trying for a consistent process you'd need to be more careful than that.

Peter.

I'd most definitely be interested if I still had my dark room here in Oz. Hand the keys to my house to the new owners tomorrow at 2:30pm :-(

hoffy said:

What's your projected cost per roll?

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That's hard to say, because I haven't run the numbers on $/ml and replenishment rates. The bottle sizes vary wildly and I'm not sure they match up in terms of capacity.

For the Rollei from Maco, I think it's about $1-$2/roll but probably worse now that the dollar has crashed. Same for the Fuji 5L kit, about $2 but it comes with more bleach capacity than dev so you can double the capacity by buying extra dev concentrates (eg Rollei) relatively cheaply.

ras351 said:

I'd be interested in c41 if it was a 4 bath variant. Shipping to tassie might be a pain though. IPS have their catalogue and prices on their website. The prices are on the high side though so it'd depend on what sort of deal/discount could be done as to whether or not it's worth it. I'm not sure if they have the lu/lorr stuff as i haven't looked for it - i was eyeing some endura paper at the time.

Click to expand...

Yeah I'm only considering 4-bath (these are lab supplies, I don't expect them to even sell 2/3-bath), probably LORR. APS doesn't seem to have it though and I've not explored the IPS pricing.

I've just started with the Digibase C41 kit, but when that's used up I'd be interested in trying something else (as long as it's affordable for this poor struggling student ).
I'm also interested in E6 6-bath, but I don't know when I'm next going to be shooting chromes or how many. I do have a crudload of RVP in the freezer that I will use on my next holiday, just not sure when that is. I'm fine with the Tetenal 3-bath stuff for colour, but if I can get better longevity from 6-bath I'm definitely up for it...

Bizarrely yet happily, macodirect is still shipping the 1L bottles of individual concentrates, so I've just ordered enough for 20L of C41 developer. They bleach+fix isn't in stock yet but I'll order some of that soon too; it's less urgent for me as I still have a couple litres left.

If anyone in Adelaide wants to include stuff in my next Macodirect order, PM me and we can work it out. There should be about 1kg of free space in the box as I intend to get a 10kg shipment. Note that the Euro is really low now (yay Eurozone crisis!) compared to the USD, which makes Kodak C41 film very affordable from macodirect compared to buying from the USA.