What shall we do for developing business affected by high price siliver halider paper ?

[keith1420]

What shall we do for developing business affected by high price siliver halider paper ?

 

[koraks]

Welcome to Photrio! You placed this in the Color section; do you want to focus specifically on color silver halide paper, or do you want to include black and white as well?

When you say "what can we do for developing businesses", which businesses do you mean specifically and do you mean by 'we' the community of amateur photographers?

From my perspective, the silver halide color paper industry currently exists of two paper manufacturers: Fuji and Lucky. The silver halide business of both is driven by digital photographic prints. As darkroom printers, there's very little we can do since we do not constitute a significant volume - not even if there were more people printing color in the darkroom. We'd really have to multiply by a factor of 1000 or more to start making a bit of an impact on sales.

I did for a while try to Libby with Fuji for developing a future perspective for color silver halide, but this was met with very little response in the company. Understandably, they focus their efforts on extracting the most value from the digital print segment until the product category effective stops existing. I don't think we can or should expect anything from them in regard to darkroom printing.

How the situation is for Lucky, I do not know. They focus on the same market ad Fuji, just a different geographical scope, and thus, they are bound to roughly the same market dynamics, which revolve around cost.

In the interim, it's theoretically possible that a third party pops up that develops the capability to manufacture a color darkroom printing paper. I am not aware of initiatives to this effect, and I frankly don't think it's a very attractive or realistic business opportunity. Color darkroom printing is a small niche and the current product offering is very affordable, which makes it difficult for any new market entrant to capture any significant value to recoup r&d investments.

So to sum it up: not much.