What happened to Forte?
Printable View
What happened to Forte?
http://www.polywarmtone.com/
TLDNR; Company structure wasn't able to react quickly enough to the traditional photo market contraction as digital took over. Company went bankrupt.
which developer do you use with the Forma 121 warm tone paper.
I make up my own D55...but the agfa wt developer is very nice...made lots of points on both
It's just cheaper and easier to make my own
Wanna tell us whats in that D55?
From Photo Lab Index:
Defender 55
Water, 125 F/52C 500cc
Metol 2.5g
Sodium Sulfite, desiccated 37.5g
Hydroquinone 10.0g
Sodium Carbonate, monohydrated 44.0g
Potassium Bromide 5.0g
Cold Water to 1.0 l
Forte had strong demand for their products right to the end, especially their VC paper, which many pro labs were using in high volume. But here's the problem of them sustaining profitability and choosing to throw in the towel, as I understand it: Their strongest point in competition was being able to deliver a high quality product at distinctly lower pricing. But facilities were wearing out and in need of a lot of maintenance expense. It seems all these Eastern Block coatings factories were once government subsidized for sake of government needed materials in volume. This allowed big factories, but simply too big to properly maintain once they became privatized. This kind of thing happened to various manufacturing lines which were not impacted by digital innovation at all. If a substantial nest egg is not put away for inevitable maintenance and remodeling needs, the business is either going to crash anyway, or has to find an investor with the necessary funds and willingness of risk, who will of course subsequently need to raise product prices accordingly. So no takers.
Forte also had to meet EU RoHS standards. Eliminating a whole host of substances. This did in a heck of a lot of cameras too. The Pentax 67II, XPAN, list goes on trying to eliminate Lead solder was a major challenge.
I don't understand why it's legal to make billions of tons of plastic yogurt cups, but not allow a little Cadmium in paper that will hang for 200 years
Those restrictions affected products well outside the EU, even earlier. It's rumored that the restriction of cadmium was the demise of the original Seagull G from Japan as well as Portriga from Agfa in Germany. It is a very nasty substance. There is such horrid soil contamination by lead and cadmium from former paint factories in this area that those particular neighborhoods are now essentially hermetically sealed by all that nasty stuff being capped off by concrete and asphalt; and you can't even drill a bolt hole in a concrete slab without a permit. I have artist friends with horrific health issues due to cadmium and lead in oil paints. There has been a method developed in the EU to coat cadmium with transparent titanium via vac deposition much like a lens, which makes it almost inert and harmless to mammalian physiology, even if accidentally swallowed. But ironically, the facilities that are capable of doing that aren't even allowed to obtain the cadmium, so unsafe artist's colors are still being made the old way on the basis of very restricted cadmium volumes. Leaded solder was voluntarily relinquished for use in Kentucky moonshine stills once people around there discovered they liked drinking lighter fluid better - that's a quip of course, but not far from the truth of what blinded certain people I grew up around in the foothills of the Sierra.