Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
Well, ordering from anyone at the moment is getting difficult. I have a backorder from B&H. There are several enormous distribution problems going on at once. Kodak apparently stopped paper production while shifting over to a new subcontractor in China - always a complicated situation. This created massive additional demand on Fuji products. Meanwhile, there's still a huge backlog on things generally, due to lingering pandemic issues. And then, at the more local level everywhere, there's a generational change where even large camera store personnel don't even understand darkroom color printing anymore, and can't communicate well with their product buyers. All this has discouraged even big houses like B&H and Freestyle from stocking any kind of RA4 paper anymore except for Fuji's convenience line of cut sheet of CAii.
I guess, at a certain point, I'll have to try leveraging Fujifilm.USA to sell rolls directly to me through the designated Sales Rep. Although I know how to play that game very well indeed, it's not like back when I was spending millions of dollars apiece on multiple equipment and materials brands before I retired. Small token purchases don't do much to entice returns to your phone calls, even at a thousand bucks a pop. And I'm not quite at that point anyway. Have plenty of other ongoing projects. And there simply might not be any surplus product on hand in Fuji warehousing at this time anyway. That is the first thing I'll try to get a firm answer to; do they even have it? Otherwise, in the long haul, it might be necessary to form some kind of purchasing co-op that attracts their attention. We'll see. But with prices on essential materials like PET substrate based on petrochemicals wildly high at the moment, a company like Fuji might have very good reason to be reluctant to make surplus product until things level off a bit. A substantial war going on at the moment certainly doesn't help things either.
CAii ain't bad as an "ordinary" RA4 paper. I regard it as almost a proofing product prior to printing on expensive Fujiflex itself, especially in large sizes. I know how to make the most out of CAii. But it's just as much effort as printing onto Fujiflex itself; and my oh my, the latter just has that extra "something" - not just the 3d effect of the full gloss, like Cibachrome had, but an expanded hue gamut with both more saturation and more contrast that makes it something really special, which is what I actually need. And there is every reason to think it's more permanent too.
The notion of trying to get someone else to cut Fujiflex into more convenient sizes, now that Fuji itself no longer does it, is not very realistic, because it would not only involve shipping and handling costs both direction, but an additional markup on an already expensive product. And there is a big advantage in having something like a 30 inch roll on hand: I can turn it into any size I want from 30X40 inches down. But cutting a big heavy roll in the dark ain't all that fun either; and for a reasonable markup combined with domestic availability, I'd probably go for that. But obtaining it from the EU would probably be ridiculously expensive. So far, Fujiflex has been made in Japan, not in the Netherlands like CAii. I did buy it 30X40
Fujiflex cut sheets packaged that way by Fuji itself at one time, but doubt we'll ever see that again. Most of this gets used on big laser printers connected to automated XY cutters on one end, and a dedicated wide RA4 processor on the output end. So small users like me might be regarded as both a nuisance customer, and/or as unwanted competition to the volume users who routinely spend serious money not only for their papers, but chemicals, and possibly even machinery too.
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