As our favorite sheet films slowly cease to be manufactured and companies ride off into the sunset, there is a lot of talk these days about hoarding a lifetime supply of something and freezing it.
As a professional, over the years I have routinely purchased light-sensitive materials by the case and popped them into a dedicated freezer. But I have never run personal tests nor seen scientific data on maximum life expectancy of frozen film and paper.
I did however purchase and freeze a thousand sheets of factory-fresh HP-5 Plus in 1990. Five years later while running standard exposure/development tests with this film I noticed its bd+f was much higher than that of new stock. So I discarded the fogged supply and have never attempted long-term storage since.
Now that so many materials are disappearing, my thoughts have returned to this question. I just found a Kodak web page (one of several) which discourages frozen storage beyond six months. While the film does not chemically age very quickly at this temperature, apparently cosmic rays (I’m not kidding) continue to act upon the frozen emulsion to increase grain size and base fog.
Kodak makes it sound like long-term hoarding and freezing of film is just a pipedream.
Any thoughts or personal experiences would be extremely useful.
Here is the Kodak document:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/h1/storageP.shtml#p
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