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.
Going to admit that I only scanned through the video.
More so than in smaller formats, B&W is cheaper. Older style emulsions (cubic grain) are also cheaper than newer style (tabular / shell / whatever). Litho film is cheaper still.
B&W is USD$1-$3 per shot in 4x5, and if you process yourself you’re only paying for your own time and consumables. Newer styles like Delta, T-Max go for $2-$3. Older styles like HP5, FP4, Tri-X go for $1.50-$2.50. Budget lines like Arista can be found around $1/sheet.
Ortho litho (what is being used in the video) has always been dirt cheap by comparison. It’s like $0.30 per sheet. Basically, all of the technical innovation that has gone into modern film is simply not used in ortho litho. You just need high contrast and resolution, that’s it. So you don’t need complicated sensitizing dyes or anything of that sort.
I don't know the commercial situation in the US, but here in Europe it's still cheaper to set your own darkroom up - for black and white film, that is. Color (both negative and "slide") always was, and still is, costly and "messy". If you shoot b&w, perhaps you really should make developing at home an option.
Developing at home (even color) is easy, especially if you have a sous vide machine to maintain temperature. Scanning 120 is also easier than 35mm because the larger negative means you can actually get away with using something like an Epson flatbed (whereas with 35mm if you want decent quality you need a dedicated scanner). Film is really fairly affordable for a hobby if you don't outsource development and scanning to 3rd parties.
Hi hacker News, so I recently got in a film photography. But then I realized all the labs around here, end up charging about 15 to $20 per roll if you want them to get developed and scanned.
Assuming you shoot a roll of film every single weekend, you end up spending 1k per year to develop it all.
Developing at home is not an option ( although I would be open to a magic machine that does it for me ).
Sad to say, that's what it costs. You might be able to save a few bucks shopping around or using mail-in photo labs, but not much. Also, prices are going up these days for both film and developing. It's only gotten more expensive since I started last decade due to both decreases in supply and increases in demand.
If you're willing to stick with black and white you can get sort-of close to "magic machine that does it for you" using something like Cinestill monobath. That will do several rolls for $20. Then you have to scan yourself.
Think about it this way. A brand new high quality full frame digital camera will cost thousands of dollars. Film camera prices are going up, but you can still get a very nice 35mm film SLR for just a few hundred depending on which one you want. The lenses for the film camera are almost definitely going to be dramatically less expensive as well. Then you add the cost of film and developing over time and now you're pretty much just coming into the same price range as the digital camera.
TL;DR: digital and analog are about the same price over time, assuming you are buying a brand new digital camera.
The only way to do photography on the cheap is to use your phone (that you were going to buy anyway) or to buy an older/used digital camera. And if you are strapped for cash, that is exactly what I recommend. Why buy a new camera that is a low-end model when you can buy an older camera that was the top-tier professional camera of its day? For example, the Canon 5D Mark II can be had for just a few hundred bucks, and that's just one option of many.
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.
Welcome to film? It costs money? This is a key reason why everyone switched to digital...
You can Google around and find mail order processing for ~$5 a roll, and scan it yourself (flatbed with film-adapter, or for more money, dedicated film-scanning hardware that's usually much higher quality). You can develop black-and-white in a dark room yourself and probably get it cheaper. Not sure HN is the best venue for film-specific info, though; perhaps a film forum somewhere?
Lack of competition, 15 years ago you could get 36 pictures developed for £3 through the post and get sent a new film to use. Now there is only one place the develops film in my town and it is £20
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.)
No, the cost for developing rolls (or the price per roll) wasn't why photographers switched to digital. It was about speed, convenience, and having the blessing of spending a lot of shots on a subject without running out of film.
Film and developing doesn't really cost that much. Comparing the cost of a film camera (used) plus film and development, you'd probably have to shoot hundreds of rolls to equal the cost of a digital body.
Here are some figures off the top of my head, as a user of Hasselblad V (film) systems for approaching 15 years. All the work on my site (link in "about" page) is shot with Hasselblad film cameras. Mostly with the 6x6 V cameras.
A top spec Epson flatbed+negative scanner will cost you in the region of $500. This will allow you to scan medium format film at a quality more than adequate for web stuff and also for printing up to 50x50cm.
Film costs are now in the region of $7 per roll for quality B&W and $15 per roll for quality colour. That's good stuff by the likes of Ilford and Kodak.
Development of B&W is trivial to do at home, and will cost you around $3 per roll. You can economise by reusing chemicals or by doubling up (two rolls in a tank for example) to bring this down to $1 per roll. Chemicals will last in the region of one year if stored in air tight light proof containers.
Development of colour is slightly more involved but can still be done for around $5 per roll.
Printing is where the expense comes at you. Depending on paper, sizes, inks, etc, this can set you back anything from $5 per print for a cheap mass-market lab style print for 20x20cm, to $30 if the inks/paper are better.
All in all I don't think it's that much more expensive than using a digital camera. You shoot less, you shoot different photos, you see different things. I average around 50 rolls per year through my Hasselblad.
Film and chemicals more available again ? They've never been hard to get, at least here in France. They are just WAY more expensive now as they are popular amongst younger photographers who don't mind over paying common vintage cameras and 30euros for 36 pictures to be shot/developped/scanned.
It's strange, my mom and all her friends took thouands of photos on film. I threw away boxes and boxes of them when I cleaned out her house when she passed.
Slides/print film and processing did not used to be cost-prohibitive. But I shot a few rolls of 35mm on my old SLR a few years ago and was stunned at the costs to just have them processed and scanned to digital files.
I used to do my own (B&W) processing as a kid and paid for it with paper route and lawn-mowing money; I don't know what that costs these days but it sure seems that film photography is no longer a reasonably cheap hobby.
I really only shoot B&W so its still pretty cheap. There are also relatively inexpensive C41 color negative films. Slide/Chrome films on the other hand are all expensive. As for convenience, sure, there are no more drive through 1hr photomats, but the entire reason I went back to film is to immerse myself in the process, so I develop everything at home. I print B&W at home, and I scan at home (with a Pentax K-1ii mounted on a copy rig made froma Sinar P2). If you want snapshot, digital is certainly better in most ways, but if you want to understand and participate in a fascinating optical and chemical process, film is quite amazing.
If you have a digital camera (SLR or mirrorless), which most people who shoot film do, you also have an excellent scanner. I scan 35mm, 120, and 4x5 with a DSLR, inverted tripod, and macro lens. The results are better than any flatbed scanner.
Use a rocket or canned air to keep the dust off, and a sheet of anti-newton glass to keep the film flat and focused while scanning.
Developing B&W at home is economical if you use a shelf-stable developer (I like Kodak HC-110, a half-open bottle keeps for years) and fixer (Ilford Rapid). Per-roll developing cost is between 50¢ and $1.
I shoot a few rolls and throw them in a big Paterson tank. Two rolls of film take 30 min to develop and 15 min to scan. Not much longer than the time to drive round trip to the photo lab.
No darkroom necessary- I load film in a dark bag. Post-process the scans in Lightroom or Darktable. Batch-processing means it's pretty fast. If I want to make prints, either I send out the digital positive to ProDPI or I rent time at the community darkroom.
Some people actually enjoy developing and scanning/printing everything themselves.
But it's true that colour photography is essentially dead for non billionaires. I stocked up with more than 100 rolls a few years ago. When I run out, I'll just continue with black and white.
Bulk rolls of Fomapan 100 are still very cheap. For 4x5, a single 50 sheet pack lasts me more than a year.
For 8x10, shooting X-Ray film is cheaper than Fomapan in 4x5 (but the film is very easy to scratch).
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.
reply