Tweet
There used to be a company called PCA International, originally Photo Corp of America, which ran photo studios in the Mart of Wall. They apparently went bust a couple years ago and were taken over by their main competitors, CPI Corp, who ran a similar operation for Sears Roebuck.
Now PCA used film, but CPI had apparently gone digital very early on, so when they took over PCA's assets, they had lots of cans of unused film to get rid of, so they flogged them on eBay. I picked up one of these fairly cheap ($7); it's 100 feet of 35mm film. Being designed for long-roll portrait cameras it has no perforations, making it useless for modern consumer cameras, but if you happen to have one of the old Kodak Bantams, which used #828 roll film (unperf'd 35mm with a paper backing), one such canister can be a lifetime supply.
The problem is, nobody seems to have a spec sheet on this film. Kodak doesn't identify it on the box beyond a catalog number and Special Order code (SO-016 Gen2), what kind of core it's wound on, and that it's C-41 process. The can says the same thing, only new info being "Packaged exclusively for PCA International Inc.". The guy who sold it thought it was equivalent to Portra NC-160; when I called Kodak, they said that being a special order they had no data on it (which I can't believe, I'm sure they have data on every product they manufacture but there may have been a NDA involved or some other reason they couldn't tell me). A couple of hours later the Kodak guy called me back and said that all he could find out was that it's 200 speed; that's maybe 1/3 of a stop difference from 160, so it really doesn't matter, but I'd like to know for sure.
So: Does anyone on this board have any experience with this film, and can tell me what emulsion and speed it actually is? I'd've called PCA themselves, but they're gone, and their successors haven't used film in recent memory.
Thanks in advance...
Now PCA used film, but CPI had apparently gone digital very early on, so when they took over PCA's assets, they had lots of cans of unused film to get rid of, so they flogged them on eBay. I picked up one of these fairly cheap ($7); it's 100 feet of 35mm film. Being designed for long-roll portrait cameras it has no perforations, making it useless for modern consumer cameras, but if you happen to have one of the old Kodak Bantams, which used #828 roll film (unperf'd 35mm with a paper backing), one such canister can be a lifetime supply.
The problem is, nobody seems to have a spec sheet on this film. Kodak doesn't identify it on the box beyond a catalog number and Special Order code (SO-016 Gen2), what kind of core it's wound on, and that it's C-41 process. The can says the same thing, only new info being "Packaged exclusively for PCA International Inc.". The guy who sold it thought it was equivalent to Portra NC-160; when I called Kodak, they said that being a special order they had no data on it (which I can't believe, I'm sure they have data on every product they manufacture but there may have been a NDA involved or some other reason they couldn't tell me). A couple of hours later the Kodak guy called me back and said that all he could find out was that it's 200 speed; that's maybe 1/3 of a stop difference from 160, so it really doesn't matter, but I'd like to know for sure.
So: Does anyone on this board have any experience with this film, and can tell me what emulsion and speed it actually is? I'd've called PCA themselves, but they're gone, and their successors haven't used film in recent memory.
Thanks in advance...