There are so many factors that have had an effect on used camera prices; the artificial "starter camera to mid range to high end" upgrade plan that people love to submit themselves and others to; gear culture that mimics watches or fashion, where cameras as accessories (or investment pieces) go in and out of style, e.g. repainted Leicas that probably won't age well; the mostly fantastical belief that you'll use vintage gear like it was meant to be used when it was new (taking your Nikon F to Vietnam, taking your Leica to Paris, etc), so the price of the gear is also the price of an experience; the concept of the grail camera and sellers pricing them accordingly; and the fact that it's a lot easier to talk about gear than it is to talk about pictures, if it were just as easy to hype up a picture as a camera, people would be selling a lot more prints.
I have a small batch of colour film in cold storage and i'm mostly going to be focusing on black and white with home development and hopefully soon home darkroom printing.
Thank you for the videos, as always. I just thought I’d share some prices from Europe. We’re in the south of Spain, heading to Morocco in a few days. Found some Fuji Xperia 400 for €14.80/roll today in Tarifa. A few days ago in Sevilla i bought a few rolls of Colorplus for €10.50/roll. I’m crossing my fingers for some odd films in Morocco.
Fuji has at least restarted production of their stuff post-covid too. I think Film’s heading in a good direction. Even Polaroid’s increased prices a wee bit too.
Used cameras are still readily available, but if no new equipment is made, the demise of film is only a matter of time. No equipment will last forever. Fully mechanical equipment can almost always be fixed, but the costs will be very high at some point. With anything with electronics, the problem will be with spare parts not available any more. Cameras made in the 1980´s and later have a great deal of electronics, and if it fails, the cameras are often beyond repair. Only source of spare parts are other broken cameras. This means that in order for film photography to be sustainable, new equipment has to be made. What Pentax/Ricoh is planning to do, is a very good sign.
Regards pricing, the massive financial crash in 2008, money printing since then, CV19 lockdowns and the subsequent inflation and energy price increases, plus costs of silver and chemistry etc, contribute hugely to these increases. If you want to see prices drop, go and remove the criminals in your governments and banking system and everything should normalize! Without the mega corporations ruling the world we can all do whatever we like in our creative ventures, and also end war, poverty and starvation. Just sayin'.
Governmenta and corps are still just people. So, you axe all those people, and just replace them with "better" people, yeah? And then man will live in harmony for all time.
@@julianprzybysawski8543 no, just the criminals. Government works fine without the criminals, cabals, mafias, corporate or special interests and law breaking. Very simple. The problem with your thinking is that you have absolutely no idea how deep this corruption goes. None. The reality presented to you is a narrative. Not real.
Are cinema film prices going up in price too and is there also a problem to meet demand? Increased demand and economic reasons are certainly a factor in the price increase but it all feels like Kodak is testing out how much people will bear the prices and it’s not a necessary step because of their good hearts and their will to help the film shooters. Otherwise I couldn’t explain the price differences in different countries. If they are below the break even point or only making little money why does everyone get a price increase even though for example german Gold 200 prices are a third or half compared to US prices? I like your optimism but I don’t have the opinion that it will get better for film shooters in the future, just more expensive and scarce
For me the issue with digital capture is that it has no intrinsic qualities, they have to be added. The result is that the standard baseline of what a photo looks like is lost to many, and we end up with awful looking HDR and the oversaturated, Disneyland looking landscape work that has infected the photo world. Film gives us a baseline. Plus darkroom printing is sublime.
Saying that "Fuji is out of film business" is not completely true. Fuji is the biggest supplier in photofinishing. Practically all RA-4 papers sold outside of North America are made by Fuji. It is also the biggest supplier of chemistry for C-41, RA-4 and E-6 for professional photofinishers. Should Fuji stop, it would mean two things: outside of US, there would be no market for color film, because us hobbyists developing their color would not support the whole business. Also, color negative would be then "for scanning only", mostly in crappy "dry minilabs", using an inkjet printer for printing. With no C-type available, there is little to do with color negative film. That said, it is still a big business for Fuji, and there are no signs of Fuji withdrawing from manufacturing color papers.
I've always seen the price on websites (Samys, BandH, The Find Lab and other's) listed per roll, never as 5-pack). Does anyone know of an online store that sells much cheaper per pro pack?
It's almost as if Kodak doesn't want a resurgence of film, isn't it?!!! They keep doing the same stupid things, over and over again, decade after decade, always expecting different results.
Woah, hold on a minute! How is film an outdated technology? This idea that a technology must be ditched and trashed because some cheap pseudo replacement arrived is nonsense. Digital is just a newer photographic technology, no need to destroy 150 years of incredible technology. What drives this destruction is globalist money greed, that's it. Profit. I understand film would be used less commercially, however the fact that the cinema industry continues to use film (and Kodak developed new film technologies quite recently for the movies) is a sign that it is far from outdated. Slow speed films can store data incredibly well, last 500 years which pisses on digital storage, and can be reproduced easily. Film still has uses in security recording because it cannot easily be forged (the original frame shows retouching easily) unlike digital fraud which is pervasive, and so on. It is not defunct at all. Fine silver/platinum/cyanotype/etc prints are far more valuable than inkjet prints and last longer. I think the resurgence of film is due to the cheap quality of digital and the uniqueness of a hand print. Digital hybrid has many uses, I am not against it, but let's face it, camera manufacturers have been trying to make their sensors create a film "look" for decades without great success. And what do you get? A file of numbers that quite often disappear into the aether. A box of negatives, slides and prints is like a treasure trove in comparison. It's the damned greed and profit driven insanity of this world that destroys such fine craft, engineering, chemistry etc, and has put so many talented people out of work. Do you want a world where robots do everything? Fuck that
