I am amazed at the self-restraint shown by Photo-engineer in this difficult situation, there must be so much he would like to say but feels it improper to do so.
I had this happen twenty years ago with an Ilford 120 film, there is a deep underlying problem, film is sensitive to radiation, we usually think it only sensitive to visual radiation but we know it is sensitive to X rays and also to ionizing radiation from radio-active sources. Rolling up a sensitive emulsion tightly against a paper wrapper having coatings and printing inks is a chemical engineer's nightmare, but film has been surviving it for decades. People have been abusing rolls of 120 film for decades with bad storage, that hasn't changed. Film use has fallen off in the past twenty years, inventories of raw materials to make films move more slowly and the finished product moves through the distribution chain more slowly.
Someone has screwed up. My hunch is that the paper maker has allowed a controlled variable to become uncontrolled, they may not even be aware that this has happened, it might be that they re-ordered some material from THEIR supplier and that is where the error originates, this is a long chain of manufacturing stages where the end result can take months to reach the final product.
There is a new generation of young photographers enjoying what film can do. It is very discouraging that this mess should be thrown in their faces.
