Price of silver continues to climb to extraordinary levels

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A significant difference for a product with a retail price of $4-5.

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Don't forget that one can get films at 90cents (Euro) retail. And those contain not less silver.

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Originally Posted by AgX

Don't forget that one can get films at 90cents (Euro) retail. And those contain not less silver.

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Are they from China?

How many ounces of sliver are there in a roll of film?

in 1 gallon of fully spent fixer there is about 1/4 ( .25 ) troy oz of silver.
or so i have been told ...

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Originally Posted by AgX
Don't forget that one can get films at 90cents (Euro) retail. And those contain not less silver.

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Originally Posted by Moopheus

Are they from China?

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No, from Rochester.

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Originally Posted by Moopheus

According to this article on Silver recovery from the USGS (2000), film has around 5-8 grams of silver per sq. meter (the paper notes that precise formulations are not revealed by film companies).

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Thanks for pointing out this article, seems like a potentially interesting read, although I still need to get through it.

Based on the current price of silver (about $1 per gram) and the amount of surface area in a roll of 35mm film (I estimate about 0.055 square meter) and about 6.5 grams of silver per square meter (midpoint of the estimates given in earlier post) I estimate a roll of film contains about $0.36 worth of silver. This represents something like a $0.14 increase over the previous year average price, and perhaps a $0.18 increase over the five year average. If we assume that the markup over the cost of raw materials is perhaps threefold (please supply a better number if you have one) then one might expect the cost of film to increase by about $0.50 per roll. If the markup is six fold then one might expect an increase of about $1 per roll.

However, Kodak and the other film producers have probably hedged the commodity price in order to allow them a predictable cost of manufacturing. This may somewhat buffer the price increase, at least in the short term. Therefore, if the price increase does not last too long we might not see quite such a large increase in film prices, but who knows for sure? Nobody.

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Originally Posted by keithwms

Driving some of the wild commodity prices is the short-term prospect of a spike in inflation. The quantitative easing (QE) policy runs the very serious risk of overshooting the desired stimulative effect, which leads to rapid decline in the value of the USD and hence a big spike in the commodities traditionally valued in USD... oil etc. Now... since QE2 we've not seen much sign of inflation at all and oil is rising but in a gradual and predicted way. Yet certain commodities are being priced even further beyond reason. So this begs the question, who really believes these commodity prices will hold?

Buy land not precious metals, that would be my investment advice! At least you can put up a tent on it ;)

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Actually I would invest in rare earth minerals, they are required for all electronic devices made today and China has a hammer lock on supply and they have been difficult in terms of supplying other countries.

As for property investment, until the boomers all shuffle off this mortal coil, I'll be loathe to invest in land.

This could be a bubble like gold and the housing market. The spike in silver prices can make used fixer desirable like used cooking grease with those Biodiesel cookers. Trash turns into treasure.

I haven't read all of the thousands of posts (my page said that there have been 8717 new posts since I last showed up here). But, I have to say that from what I've read. the price is not going down unless gold does. Someone, somewhere, decided that the price of gold isn't too high; the price of silver is too low, and needs to be linked to gold so that they rise and fall together. It's absolute bullshit, but that's the market for ya. The market is a herd of sheep driven by a pack of squirrels.

Of course this is really bad news, but I guess it will test our attachments and show how committed we are. Are you willing to draw on dried animal skins with burnt sticks? If not, why did you get into this thing anyway? Photography just made drawing different, not even easier. Just different.

I bought a French easel last year, and I'm glad I did. What will I do with my darkroom? Should I convert it back to a contractor's trailer? With plumbing and wiring? That ought to be worth something to somebody.

When I barbeque chickens in the summertime, I wrap grape vine clippings in aluminum foil (several layers) and put them in the coals. Makes the greatest drawing charcoal!

Now that I have been forced to think about this: Back in the 1970's I could buy a box of 100 sheets of SW Agfa Brovira for about $12. When the Hunt bros. cornered the silver market, that same box went up to about $30, if I recall correctly. That was a lot of money in those days. When the Feds forced the Hunts to divest, through anti-trust action, the price of Ag returned to normal (about $5-$6/Troy Oz. at the time), the price of that box of paper dropped to about $22. I have boxes with stickers on them to prove this, should the need arise. Well, actually, the later ones are DW, but I think you probably get the point.

Photography - silver photography - IS commodity, and we aren't going to escape it. Unless...