Comment by regus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by regus | Hacker News Reader

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I have also been playing around with film photography. I am old enough to have actually developed film in college so it's not a new novelty for me.

For whatever reason I got the idea into my head that I should get a medium format camera (perhaps it was the youtube influence). I've always wanted to play around with one of these cameras, so I dropped $350 on a Yashica Mat 124-G TLR camera.

I wish I had done this years ago because film photography is now a rich man's hobby. The prices of everything is shooting through the roof right now.

Cameras that nobody wanted now cost over a thousand, film that you could have gotten for $6 is now $15 per roll. Fuji and Kodak either discontinue their film options or raise the prices of existing ones.

Let's do the math (based on my local camera store):

- 1 roll of 120 Portra 400: $14

- Develop and scanned at high resolution: $41

- Sales tax: $3.64

- Total: $58.64

When you shoot medium format you only get 12 shots, which means that each shot costs around $4.88 dollars!

Did you know that it actually costs more money to have a lab develop black and white pictures than color? Which means that if you want to save money you need to develop your own photos and scan them yourself.

Which means buying more stuff and having to deal with chemicals.

Oh and by the way, apparently all home film scanning options are considered to be junk compared to scanners used at the lab. So you either need to spend a lot for a fancy scanner, or rig up some elaborate contraption where you take pictures of your negatives with a DSLR.

Thinking about this gives me buyers remorse.

I guess developing BW film is more expensive because there's just less volume? Most people shooting BW film probably develop it themselves while it's way harder to develop color film without getting a full lab.

The price for 35mm per shot is a bunch less for me. And it seems like people still have stocks o their old 35mm film rolls I can get for free-ish. Developing and scanning was something like 17 euros for me.

Seeing I spent 4.5 months to fill up my current 35mm roll I think I can accept the higher price per frame.

The reason I've heard why it is more expensive is that color development has been completely standardized. You put the rolls in the machine and the negatives come out the other end with little interaction from a person.

They never standardized black and white photography development so it all has to be done by hand, which is more time consuming.

As for 35mm, yes it's true that it is cheaper, but I got into this for the larger negative, so this is a self imposed financial hit.

You can do the same thing with B&W--buy a standard high-volume film processor and load it up with B&W film chemistry. If you look at the data sheets for XTOL, you'll see instructions for high-volume processing. B&W processing is not standardized (in the sense that there are standards for it, but nobody uses them) but that doesn't mean you have to do it by hand.

I think the reason why it is more expensive is just because it is a specialty service. Even in a large city, the amount of B&W film processed per day is not going to be very large, in 2022. On top of that, it's easy enough to process B&W yourself--it's not prohibitively expensive and can even be done in a small apartment without too much fuss.

(One reason that there are standards for B&W film processing is because it's necessary in order to have standards for film speed. The "ISO speed" of a film is tested by exposing the film to certain amounts of light, developing in a standardized way using a standardized developer, and then measuring some certain part of the resulting density curve.)

> They never standardized black and white photography development so it all has to be done by hand, which is more time consuming.

The 'default' process for processing colour film is C-41:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-41_process

You can get B&W film that uses the same process:

* https://www.ilfordphoto.com/xp2-super-35mm

One of the hard things about colour film processing in the past was that the chemicals had to be in a narrow temperature range: nowadays that is relatively easy to do by 'simply' keeping them in a warm bath kept in the correct range via sous vide equipment.

Generally if you're doing analog B&W photography at any non-small volumes, it's probably cheaper to get the gear to have your own darkroom and at least process the negatives yourself. Once you see the shots, you can then perhaps take them to a printer if you don't want to do that yourself.

I think film prices have doubled or thereabouts in the past few years, this might be part of the global supply chain issues rather than a long-term condition (I hope).

Except you have to consider inflation has been galloping since the 1980s. So even these may be cheaper than back in the day...

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