Jay,
no, Orwo isn´t Efke. Efke used to be Adox/DuPont, a western german company, their emulsion technology was licensed to Fotokemika in Yugoslavia/Croatia.
This is GDR-Orwo... Orwo means "Original Wolfen", which used to be the Agfa Wolfen plant, one of the biggest photochemical factories in the world. After the war Afga started out with two companies - the rather smallish photopaper plant in LEverkusen was dedicated to be the core of the recently formed "Agfa, daughter company of Bayer" (of Aspirin fame), Agfa Wolfen was seized and transferred into a Soviet-German joint stock company. Parts of the plant were moved to the Ukraine, to the town of Sumi - this is today the "Svema" brand. In the late 1950s Agfa Leverkusen secured the trademark, Agfa Wolfen (now a GDR property) lost - it put an end to the delivery of film from east to west.
Agfa Wolfen now chose to work under the new label "ORiginal WOlfen", Orwo.
With the collapse of the GDR Orwo went down in flames - they stopped coating in 1994 (allthough they just started marketing on a few emulsions), large parts of the plant were demolished. The brand continued to exist as a private label, they confectioned Ilford and Agfa film under their label and ran a mailorder lab service.
Orwo finally collapsed in 2002-2003 when the parental company Pixelnet went bankcrupt (altogether with Photo Porst, another old german photo brand).
The film you have is plain old Orwopan, if you can quote me the exact type name and the "best use before" date, I can give you times for several developers, including Rodinal, ID11/D76/F19 and A49.
no, Orwo isn´t Efke. Efke used to be Adox/DuPont, a western german company, their emulsion technology was licensed to Fotokemika in Yugoslavia/Croatia.
This is GDR-Orwo... Orwo means "Original Wolfen", which used to be the Agfa Wolfen plant, one of the biggest photochemical factories in the world. After the war Afga started out with two companies - the rather smallish photopaper plant in LEverkusen was dedicated to be the core of the recently formed "Agfa, daughter company of Bayer" (of Aspirin fame), Agfa Wolfen was seized and transferred into a Soviet-German joint stock company. Parts of the plant were moved to the Ukraine, to the town of Sumi - this is today the "Svema" brand. In the late 1950s Agfa Leverkusen secured the trademark, Agfa Wolfen (now a GDR property) lost - it put an end to the delivery of film from east to west.
Agfa Wolfen now chose to work under the new label "ORiginal WOlfen", Orwo.
With the collapse of the GDR Orwo went down in flames - they stopped coating in 1994 (allthough they just started marketing on a few emulsions), large parts of the plant were demolished. The brand continued to exist as a private label, they confectioned Ilford and Agfa film under their label and ran a mailorder lab service.
Orwo finally collapsed in 2002-2003 when the parental company Pixelnet went bankcrupt (altogether with Photo Porst, another old german photo brand).
The film you have is plain old Orwopan, if you can quote me the exact type name and the "best use before" date, I can give you times for several developers, including Rodinal, ID11/D76/F19 and A49.