Because the manufacturing facilities are often old and not cost effective to fix up
I have always been a little puzzled as to why super good, super popular products disappear and never seem to reappear. Yeah, sure, they might come back into production by name only and are not the same quality as the original. Or the brand name has been purchased and now the company is trying to pass of junk relying on the "brand name" to sell it. It sure seems that if Oriental Seagull was that good of a paper, and it was that good, then why isn't some manufacture picking up on it? Same for older Agfa, Kodak and Forte papers. If folks are willing to pay top dollar for some films then I'm sure they would do the same for a paper with a great Dmax and heavy silver content.
The problem that enlarging papers suffer, compared to the B&W films produced today, is that folks can used B&W film to produce Inkjet or digital prints. That means there is more of a market for B&W film than there is for a really top notch B&W printing paper. Or any printing paper for that matter. The lower amount of replies to this thread itself bares this out. The only solution to this problem is for all of us here to break our darkroom equipment out of storage and get going on some "REAL" printing. I'm not going to hold my breath!
That might be the case for film, but I don't buy it for paper manufacturing and coating. Also, why can't another coating facility coat an emulsion exactly like Forte or Oriental had onto a good quality paper. I can't believe that paper emulsions were as tricky to make as film emulsions since your are not enlarging the paper, only the film negative. Well, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it and will just use what's out there and be happy I, or we, stilll have that.Because the manufacturing facilities are often old and not cost effective to fix up
Because "super popular" often means "me and a couple other guys really, really like this", but there's no sizeable market and no opportunity for a healthy margin to be made. Because otherwise, the product of course would not disappear. Fondness for something in a small group of people just doesn't make a manufacturer any money.I have always been a little puzzled as to why super good, super popular products disappear
why can't another coating facility coat an emulsion exactly like Forte or Oriental had onto a good quality paper. I can't believe that paper emulsions were as tricky to make as film emulsions since your are not enlarging the paper, only the film negative.
I suspect it's because of the same reason why they've not coated MCC and MCP in a long time: the production economics would result in a retail price that's so high that Adox believe there won't be sufficient demand. An added complication going by old reports when they still actively updated the general public on the Polywarmtone project is that there was some production engineering involved in going from a working emulsion to an actually production-ready product.Not sure why they haven't made a paper.
I think the only way we would see papers like Seagull, MCC, Forte and others is if Foma or Ilford took the paper/emulsion formula and did limited runs so people could stock up on there favorite paper.
You are so right and that's too bad, but sometimes the truth is hard for me to swallow. I'd love to think there was a market for a really high class paper like there is for really high class cars, but there's not. We'll just have to get by with the good papers of today and forget the really good papers of the past.That's an interesting idea; sadly, Adox rejected it earlier when it was proposed them for their papers. The suggestion has been made by several people over the years to finance a production run for a paper by pre-orders from users, but Adox' argument was that they should invest in their own production and they wouldn't want to push this investment onto their customers in advance. Anyone can make from that decision what they will, but either way, it seems that they just don't want to go the
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