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As of 1/19/26, Silver is $89/oz

NortheastPhotographic

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Joined
Mar 3, 2011
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1,594
Location
Maine!
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How are your silver trap trickle tanks going?! Just sent off our 2 stage system to Scott Precious Metals. The top one will be more saturated with silver. The lower unit 'would have' been swapped as the top unit but we switched to a Hallmark 7L set up. I'm always curious how much we can capture!
 
Pretty incredible prices, imo.

I haven’t worked with that sort of thing for quite a few years, but we used to recover quite a lot of silver. Real large lab for a studio chain; we used to ship somewhere around 300 lb of electrolytic flake every month.

You probably already know this, but the steel/iron wool cartridges can be something of a crap shoot with regard to your returns. You never know for sure what you're gonna get out of em. You pretty much gotta just trust your refiner. So that's a big advantage to having an electrolytic system (assuming one understands what's going on, and how to operate it). With electrolytic flake you let it drain for a bit before knocking it off the cathode(s) then weigh it. Then you know, with pretty good certainty, what is there.

Best luck on your return.
 
I wonder what one of those smaller electrolytic plater machines cost? Maybe when we install the roboline I'll consider one. With both B&W and C41 going through the machine, should be a decent amount of silver outflow via the used fix.
 
NortheastPhotographic said:
I wonder what one of those smaller electrolytic plater machines cost? Maybe when we install the roboline I'll consider one. With both B&W and C41 going through the machine, should be a decent amount of silver outflow via the used fix.
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Alibaba has several small silver recover machines for sale.

US based silver recovery companies don't want to sell you a machine; they want to sell you a harvesting contract and a machine lease. Ironically, they tend to turn their noses up at anyone who doesn't produce thousands of ounces of sliver a month. Claim it's not worth their time; at least that was my experience when trying to get a system for the motion picture lab in which I worked.

They live in the past...

 
How much silver is actually in today's B&W film? Companies decades ago developed new films. like TMax, that had very little silver content. Why the old Kodak films where in someways better. You had to develop a cr*p load of the old films (like thousands of rolls) to get enough silver to make it worth to reclaim. Today's films even at $89 dollars an ounce makes it questionable. An $89 an ounce is the Wall Street commodity price, not what someone will actually pay you for it.
 
Tom Taylor said:
The price of Silver on the market rose to $111/oz this moring and wil probable rise further in the coming days. The current price of 8x10 Delta 100 is $10 a sheet ($250 box) at B&H – double what I last paid.
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Unfortunately silver costs aren't a major reason for increasing film prices. At least for those of us in the US my understanding is that the most recent price increases can primarily be blamed on tariffs.
 
Sure, but your box of 25 sheets of 8x10 delta contains maybe 6.25g of silver (assuming 5gsm which I picked as an upper end posted here by Ian Grant). That's about $24 of silver even at $110/ounce.
 
thinkbrown said:
Unfortunately silver costs aren't a major reason for increasing film prices. At least for those of us in the US my understanding is that the most recent price increases can primarily be blamed on tariffs.
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Unfortunately for consumers, manufacturers often take advantage of both rising import duties and raw material price increases to justify price adjustments, which is only good business practice from their perspectives.
 
Alan Townsend said:
Unfortunately for consumers, manufacturers often take advantage of both rising import duties and raw material price increases to justify price adjustments, which is only good business practice from their perspectives.
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Exactly! The minute somebody cries "inflation, shortage or tariff" the retail price start to climb. But, but, but I thought with this new sheriff in town the consumer prices were suppose to go down to what they were in the early 2000's?????
 
John Wiegerink said:
Exactly! The minute somebody cries "inflation, shortage or tariff" the retail price start to climb. But, but, but I thought with this new sheriff in town the consumer prices were suppose to go down to what they were in the early 2000's?????
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Reminds me of "The Lawman" series of the late 50s and early 60s Apparently he was well intentioned as you can tell by the intro theme

https://www.google.com/search?q=The...ate=ive&vld=cid:b224cd08,vid:Vgo8P1TY4Ts,st:8

pentaxuser
 
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Tom Taylor said:
50 Grams of siver nitate is now $228.95 at B&S - triple what I last paid.
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My wife is thinking of selling her mom's old twelve-person sterling silverware set. You can;t believe what it's worth today. We stopped using it 30 years ago. Who wants to clean all that silverware every time you use it?
 
Alan Townsend said:
Unfortunately for consumers, manufacturers often take advantage of both rising import duties and raw material price increases to justify price adjustments, which is only good business practice from their perspectives.
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That was a line my dentist used when I asked him why his prices went up so much. I mean, how much silver or gold can you put in one tooth?
 
John Wiegerink said:
Exactly! The minute somebody cries "inflation, shortage or tariff" the retail price start to climb. But, but, but I thought with this new sheriff in town the consumer prices were suppose to go down to what they were in the early 2000's?????
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I'm sorry, but your response is too political for me.
 
As one of the actual (proverbial) sheriffs here on Photrio, I'll merely say - move on from the politics everyone.
I clearly need a black hat, and a white hat, so that I can switch back and forth as needs direct.
 
In the 90s, before he started his own business, my father did picture framing work for Gold Leaf Studios... the price of a book of gold leaf was $35. I see it's about 4X now.

The process is interesting, you cover the frame with "Size" which is a yellowish glue, then use what I recall is a camel hair brush to tamp down the gold. He taught me as a teenager but I never quite got it down. After that you smooth and burnish it with various tools.

This was his biggest gold project, Joan of Arc statue, visit it if you find yourself in New Orleans:


 
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