Is the film craze dead?

Sirius Glass · Apr 6, 2023

Don Heisz said:
But what does that have to do with what I said? You don't have the options with gasoline or prescriptions that you do with film.
Also, you said you have a bunch of frozen film. When is the last time you bought new Kodak film?
I bought a box of 4x5 Tri-X a couple of months ago.

So long ago that I have forgotten, however I am in Samy's often picking up developed film and I see today's prices and that always caused my to cycle through that days replacement costs and what the impact will be. My point is that everything else necessary in life is going up so fast, that the impact of film costs, had I purchased replacement film, would still be a noise bump in the road. I would much rather pay for today's film than a trip to the pharmacy [I have great insurance] or the gas station. One stop a the gas station is $95 but it was $30 a few years ago. Everyone has many other personal examples.

Andrew O'Neill · Apr 6, 2023

BrianShaw said:
… and all this time I thought you were analogue. LOL

Pieter12 · Apr 6, 2023

Don Heisz said:
But what does that have to do with what I said? You don't have the options with gasoline or prescriptions that you do with film.
Also, you said you have a bunch of frozen film. When is the last time you bought new Kodak film?
I bought a box of 4x5 Tri-X a couple of months ago.

Except for new drugs that have no generics, you do have a bit of a choice when it comes to prescriptions and gasoline. Around here, you can go a few blocks and the price of a gallon of gas can be different by 75¢.

Paul Verizzo · Apr 6, 2023

Pieter12 said:
Inflation levels now might be near historic levels, but they have been this high as recently as the 70s and 80s. Shit happens.

A company is deserving of profit. Why else are they in business? Of course, shareholders expect profits, too. Companies that cut quality, personnel, pay and benefits for the sake of profits are basically evil in my view. Companies that use any excuse to jack up prices, like the aforementioned oil companies, are quite unethical, too.

Actually, no where near historic levels:

I can remember home mortgage rates in the high teens. When my ex and I were able to assume a VA loan in 1974 at 7%, we were ecstatic.

DREW WILEY · Apr 6, 2023

Buy edible film for sake of the inevitability of bread being too expensive to eat in a few years.

Sirius Glass · Apr 6, 2023

Paul Verizzo said:
Actually, no where near historic levels:

View attachment 334937

I can remember home mortgage rates in the high teens. When my ex and I were able to assume a VA loan in 1974 at 7%, we were ecstatic.

We bought our first house at 9% and refinanced years later to add a floor, two bedrooms and a bathroom which took us to 11%. Every time the interest rate dropped enough we weould refinance down slowly to 6% over many years.

Paul Verizzo · Apr 6, 2023

OP, have you checked closed auctions on eBay? That's surely the best reference possible. You have a choice between all sold and all listed. The latter certainly gives you a high in the sky view. You can often detect why things didn't sell ("parts only, untested" things like that. The biggest issue is that they only look back 90 days, so if one has a rare item, there may not be any sales.

There are probably thousands of camera buyers out there that have no idea that this forum exists that do look on eBay.

I haven't looked for a "new" camera in years, but I noticed that a lot of sellers thought that their point and shoots, or a grade or two above were worth some real money. Of course, they weren't and they don't sell. OTOH, that was before film shooting was ratcheting up again. They would be great for hipsters who don't want to learn much about exposure.

An earlier poster noted that at a given price, someone, some day, will buy it. Not true. I own a short wave radio that I need to list and sell, so I have an eBay watch to see what appears. This is beyond a back of a back burner project. There is a guy that has been trying to sell the manual for this unit at $24.95 for YEARS! Hard to believe he hasn't figure things out, despite needing to relist over and over and over.

BrianShaw · Apr 6, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
Buy edible film for sake of the inevitability of bread being too expensive to eat in a few years.

Flour and other baking product prices have skyrocketed too!

Baking ingredient prices rose in 2022

As people sift through holiday baking recipes and head to the store, they will find key ingredients cost more this year. The total cost for five baking staples – flour, sugar, milk, butter, and eggs – was about 22 percent higher through the first 10 months of 2022 compared with the same period...

www.ers.usda.gov

Pieter12 · Apr 6, 2023

Paul Verizzo said:
Actually, no where near historic levels:

View attachment 334937

I can remember home mortgage rates in the high teens. When my ex and I were able to assume a VA loan in 1974 at 7%, we were ecstatic.

When we bought our home in the mid-80's we were also delighted to be able to assume a 12% mortgage! The rates at the time were closer to 14%.

campy51 · Apr 6, 2023

I remember as a kid we played stick ball everyday in the summer. We used the white pimple ball which allowed for throwing a curve and sinkers. A few years ago I looked into buying some and maybe get a couple of stick ball teams to play. Unfortunately they are no longer made even though there is a company that owns the patent rights and the molds to them. We use to pay about 10 cents a ball and sometimes we would go through 3 a day. If the company were to start producing them again they would probably cost $10-20 due to little demand and material and labor cost. I think the same thing is going to happen to film within 20 years.

Don_ih · Apr 6, 2023

Pieter12 said:
Except for new drugs that have no generics, you do have a bit of a choice when it comes to prescriptions and gasoline. Around here, you can go a few blocks and the price of a gallon of gas can be different by 75¢.

Around here, you can drive 200 miles and the price of gas may change by 3 cents a litre. And drugs are so regulated, there cannot be any significant difference between the name-brand and a generic, so only someone with a good insurance plan will get the name-brand. The generic drugs are expensive enough for those who have no insurance and have to buy them.
When you buy Foma 100, you're not getting Tmax 100 with a "generic" name. Yet people are buying Foma because it's 1/3 the cost of Tmax.

Sirius Glass said:
So long ago that I have forgotten, however I am in Samy's often picking up developed film and I see today's prices and that always caused my to cycle through that days replacement costs and what the impact will be. My point is that everything else necessary in life is going up so fast...

Film is not a necessity, so that would be why people will opt to buy a cheaper one rather than give it up.
You should buy some Kodak film. They'll only keep making it if you keep buying it. Burn all your frozen film - it's keeping you from buying new film.

DREW WILEY · Apr 6, 2023

I'm not buying Foma because three sheets of it costs more than doing it right the first time with TMax.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 6, 2023

Hassasin said:
add bad management, market blindness, business reflux maybe ... Kodak is a sad story these days, so is Fujifilm. One can hope things will change at the two, but at this point looks like something else is controlling these decisions. I don't think we will ever know.

The only actual hope is that there is going to be a choice and more and more users will stop supporting products that no matter how good it may be, is plainly overpriced.

Bad management usually isn't across an entire industry. Those companies that do a lousy job will fail or lose part of their customer base and their better competitors will take over.

Don_ih · Apr 6, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
I'm not buying Foma because three sheets of it costs more than doing it right the first time with TMax.

Except not everyone has your particular concerns. In fact, most people don't. Most film users are hobbyists. Even the large format users.

The best 8x10 photographer I know of uses HP5+.

Oh, and there's no Kodak or Ilford film that can do what Foma Retropan can do. Whether that's a good thing or not....

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 6, 2023

Paul Verizzo said:
Actually, no where near historic levels:

View attachment 334937

I can remember home mortgage rates in the high teens. When my ex and I were able to assume a VA loan in 1974 at 7%, we were ecstatic.

Your chart ends while it was still 2% or less. Here's a chart showing the last couple of years going up to 9.1%.

Monthly inflation rate U.S. 2023 | Statista

In February 2023, prices had increased by six percent compared to February 2022 according to the 12-month percentage of change in the consumer price index - the monthly inflation rate for goods and services in the United States.

www.statista.com

DREW WILEY · Apr 6, 2023

Don - serious photographers aren't all the same, or like the same look in their images. Others, like me, use a variety of films. But TMax films are perhaps the most versatile for me because I often encounter high contrast settings, and not just foggy ones. HP5 doesn't handle high contrast well, and is too grainy in my opinion for formats smaller than 8x10. But I do know how to get the most out of it, and have in fact shot and printed quite a bit of it 8x10-wise. Lets be grateful a serious sheet film selection is still available for us to choose from. One person has a grudge on Kodak, another on Ilford, another on Fuji - if everyone's pinned voodoo dolls keels over, nothing will be left. I'm not sticking any pins in Foma, hoping they fail, but am just wary of more emulsion pinholes they put in themselves.

Pieter12 · Apr 6, 2023

Don Heisz said:
The generic drugs are expensive enough for those who have no insurance and have to buy them.

I thought Canada had some sort of national health care? There may be copays, but doesn't it cover prescriptions? Does it vary that much from province to province?

Pieter12 · Apr 6, 2023

At one point, there was an app that you could install on a smartphone or iPod that would help you identify the frequencies of your tinnitus. Then, when you played music through the app, it would remove those frequencies, making the tinnitus less apparent.

DREW WILEY · Apr 6, 2023

There are different causes of tinnitus, and not all can be cured. My wife had to deal with ear conditions pre-screening potential head and neck surgery patients, because sometimes cancers were involved. But if you have neighbors boom-boxing rap music or tossing cherry bombs into an empty metal garbage can, you wan't to be deaf anyway.

Don_ih · Apr 6, 2023

Pieter12 said:
I thought Canada had some sort of national health care? There may be copays, but doesn't it cover prescriptions? Does it vary that much from province to province?

Canadian health insurance covers medical bills - going to the doctor, getting tests, necessary procedures at a hospital. It does not cover any part of prescriptions.

DREW WILEY said:
causes of tinnitus

Mine was mostly caused by my hammer. I should sue Estwing.

DREW WILEY · Apr 6, 2023

Estwhiiinnng ? How does your hand itself stop ringing if you're using a hammer with a metal handle? But forty years ago I was already selling 200 nail guns to every single traditional hammer. Then the titanium framing hammer craze came along : half the weight, but requiring twice the swing force. Not exactly logical. I think the carpenters were simply buying them as a cool fashion statement, or because they were using a toy compressor and cheap air hose, and needed a final pounding of the nails heads flat.

Cutest case was a surgeon who wanted to fool us into thinking he was one of the regulars, and actually part of the construction crew he had hired to build his home. Brand new expensive leather carpenter's bag on him, with nothing in it except a brand new titanium hammer without a scratch on it. Clean clothes, and unspotted backwards baseball cap. Meticulously clean fingers and fingernails, and no callouses - just like you'd expect with a surgeon. He tried his best to mimic blue collar lingo, or at least a stereotype of that. We went along with it, and never chuckled in his presence. After all, he was the one signing the checks.

Don_ih · Apr 6, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
How does your hand itself stop ringing if you're using a hammer with a metal handle?

I've pounded in more nails than any nail gun you'd ever find. That hammer didn't ring my hand, but the pounding does a number on your ears.

DREW WILEY · Apr 6, 2023

Not likely, Don. Our own shop probably put in more fasteners per hour than you did in a year. Some of those gun lines were automated. At one point we even had about 300K of nailgun parts on hand in our repair division - biggest parts selection in the country. But glad your hand still works. The several traditional hammers I have on hand include those my grandfather and even great grandfather used, with hand-whittled handles, plus a few new Vaughn ones, which is the only brand still using high quality hickory. Then I've got some serious quality pneumatic finish and pin nailers. I don't need a framing gun myself, though I've sold thousands of them - the high quality diecast ones prior to the melt-cast Chinese imports. For every case of hand nails, we'd sell about half a big truckload of air nails. You might be surprised to know that most of the remaining really good nails in either category are made in Canada. The shop foreman had a nailgun museum on the loft. Some of the early ones were so big that they were later adapted to driving six-inch long railcar liner bed spikes, with the operator literally sitting on a saddle atop the gun itself. Wonder what happened to all that once he passed; the parts dept inventory itself was sold off to an entrepreneur in an adjacent city. But I was retired myself by then.

VinceInMT · Apr 6, 2023

Pieter12 said:
Except for new drugs that have no generics, you do have a bit of a choice when it comes to prescriptions and gasoline. Around here, you can go a few blocks and the price of a gallon of gas can be different by 75¢.

Not only that but gasoline has cost about what it has always cost when inflation is taken into account: $3.21/gallon Going back to the mid-1970s. And, back then, my income was a fraction of what it is now and what I was driving got 10 MPG.

Drug prices? My prescription plan costs me less than $10/month and the one drug I take is at no cost. My wife has more expensive drugs and some are fully covered and the others she gets with a GoodRx coupon for cheap.

Life costs money.

Roger Cole · Apr 6, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Also, there are so many film companies and emulsions. Competition is working to keep greed down.

There are exactly two I'm aware of that produce color film, maybe one if Fuji is not currently making it and just re-selling Kodak

There are more for B&W of course but even there I'm not sure I'd call it "many." Kodak and Ilford of course. Fuji if they still make Acros II (I know it's listed, I mean MAKE it.) Foma. And I suppose Orwo with two both rather specialized emulsions. Isn't that all of them? I know there are more brands that are still being made by some of those companies above, but that's different.

Is the film craze dead?

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