Vintage Gaf papers

Jay:

I'm kind of curious, what exactly is Photo China?

-Mike

I've got about 10 boxes of GAF Lustrex in 5x7. It's way out of date and the edges show some weirdness because of it, but it works great for contact printing 4x5s.

Say, this gives me hope that the two boxes of smallish contact printing papers I got a while back with a darkroom "box-o-goodies" might still be good. One is Velox, which I remember (from high school) as being quite nice stuff; the other is an Ansco or Agfa paper. The one that has something I can sort-of interpret as a date says 48...

The Air Force bought a lot of GAF in the Mid to Early 70's, The RC VC was not up to par with early Polycontrast, hard to get a really good black and the whites seemed muddy. The other GAF paper were softer and needed a "hard developer" as I recall I think we used Dektol 1:1. After 30 to 40 years it hard tell what combination will work best. A couple of years ago I found a large batch of paper at an estate sale, Afga, Illord and Kodak, the Kodak was too fogged for even contact sheets, the Ilford had lost contrast but it is usable for high contrast negs, the Afga seemed to hold up the best.