Ed, I hear you about stretching out of date papers. I have an open-ended project the portfolio of which I add to as I continue to shoot more material. Having a uniform look to the prints is important to me so settling on a single emulsion type is key. So when supra was discontinued I stocked up on rolls of different sizes, cut sheets and different surfaces, storing them in a huge commercial chest freezer in the bathroom of my studio. Some of my stock is over a year old now and you're right, it looks just fine. And I know I should just leave it at that but then I notice the 3-5cc difference between the unexposed whites in the margins of the prints, the older stock producing the dingier paper white. Of course this should not be an issue if I mount and trim my print full bleed. But knowing that it's there can make a careful craftsman a little nuts
John, I have a couple roll paper cutters - a meteor seigen and a kreonite 52. I can cut rolls of paper from a 3" roll to a 52" roll and anything in between. They're kind of hard to come by these days for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the sheer size and weight of the units. They were designed specifically to dispense and cut rolls of photosensitive material to whatever length is dialed in. Some have manual rotary cutters, the fancier kind are totally automatic. They're no longer manufactured as the light jet process of exposing photosensitive materials cuts after the paper has been fixed making a pre-exposure, complex lightproof dispenser obsolete.
The current model supra color paper, "supra vc", despite kodak's tech manual warning, works brilliantly under the enlarger. The color palette and saturation are not only what you'd expect from a kodak paper but a very close match to the old supra. Contrast is a little hotter, though nowhere near ultra. My only regret is that the shoulder falls off a little too fast for my negatives. This is a minor quibble as it's easy to control with a general pre-exposure flash when a huge subject brightness range warrants this kind of trickery. Who knows what Kodak was thinking in discouraging traditional exposure when using their new paper.
