I am amazed at the prices that 4x5 Quickloads are going for on Ebaby. I bought 5 boxes of Provia F 100 for $140. And they were still within date (7/2006). This is barely twice the price of 2 boxes from a dealer.
Is the demand for 4x5 tranny film that soft?
www.painted-with-light.com
Doug, I don't think the demand for 4x5 film is that soft at all. If you take a look you will see that all the lower priced ebay sales have come from the same two sellers ... one of which was Hunt Photo and there's was overstock for buy for a professional client. My guess is the same is true for the other sales as well. Provia is in much higher use for commercial work than for fine art work and, as such, bulk purchases are often made with surplus at the end of the job and a fw months left to go before the film runs out. To a slightly lesser extent the same is also true of Astia. Example, last year I had a job that I thought was going to require ~ 400 sheets of Astia so I bought 20 boxes of Quickloads. I goofed! I had 8-9 boxes left over. I sold some and I still have the rest frozen.
Note too that 1) while in date the film is VERY short dated and 2) that particular seller doesn't have an absolutely pristine rating. Hunt's two sales were actually a bit cheaper and the film was longer dated 9/2006 and 10/2006 .... I bought 4 boxes in two different batches that both worked out to around 28 a box shipped.
You seldom if ever see Velvia selling like this or Acros. Sometimes some of the Kodak flavors.
You also get deals if you get lucky when a store is going out of business .... I lucked out and got 15 boxes of Provia 13x18 that way not too long ago.
Might be short dated but in the freezer that shouldn't be any problem. Personally I rarely use Velvia anymore...just can't deal with the contrast. I find Provia much better in that respect and I can get nearly the same look saturation wise with Joe Holmes' profiles.
I monitor Kodak ReadyLoad prices on eBay, and just last week was amazed at how *high* the selling prices were turning out for negative film, and that chrome did seem to be relatively less. My impression is that there is a drift away from chrome to more color negative usage, but I have no hard data.
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