expiration dates on film boxes

I've been thinking about Dan's idea of the "end of the silver era"
hypothesis about inconsistent results with TXP. I just looked at the
two boxes of TXP that I have. One was bought at a local camera store
and has an expiration date of 2/2008. I used this film a couple of
weeks ago in New Orleans and it performed perfectly. The other came
from BH PHotovideo and has an expiration date of 3/2006. It seems
that this box from BH is two years older than the other box! I have
not used this film yet.

That got me wondering: how is film dated? How long is it expected
to last? That is, when a sheet of TXP is absolutely fresh, right out
of the factory, how much into the future is it dated? And why would
the camera store have much fresher film than BH?

--shannon
Received on Thu Oct 13 11:30:52 2005