film question: your experiences/insights? – f295: The Art of Lensless Imaging:
Yep. This is the golden age of BandW, in some ways. Sure, paper suppliers are dropping like flies and we’ve lost two film manufacturers in the past couple years (AgfaFoto and Konica-Minolta, via different routes), but I can *still* buy more different kinds of BandW film than I had access to in the 1970s, and some of the least expensive are as good as anything I could get back then. And I can still get good, easy-working papers, even with Kodak packing in their lines (and again, some of the least expensive are as good as anything I could get, at any price, 30+ years ago).
If Foma were the only BandW manufacturer on the Earth, things wouldn’t be *too* bad — they’ve got a nice line of middle-of-the-road films, very good papers, and they cover the formats pretty well. Same is true of Forte, and their products are distinctly *different* from Foma. Efke, also good, and different yet again. Fuji doesn’t even sell us Americans some of their most interesting stuff, and they’re still top drawer. And as long as we have Ilford, we won’t miss Kodak much. Give it another few years, and there’ll be two or three Chinese brands in regular distribution here (Lucky is pretty decent, and I’ve been hearing good things about Shantou Era, though the Shanghai is on the cheap side).
This illustrates the point I was trying to make here and to some extent here, as well.