With today’s prices, film photography may feel like a luxury. But has it *really* been cheap, ever?
Annoyingly, the real answer is, “it depends.”
Seeing a favourite roll of film selling for a few bucks more than the last month isn’t an indicator of an average film price. There are hundreds of film brands out there (analog.cafe/app/all-film), and they all have distinct logistics, pricing, delivery fees, taxes, etc. It’s a complicated world.
I’ve been tracking an average price of 135/36exp. film rolls across various stores in the US/Canada, Europe, and HK since 2018, in a graph that visualizes those trends (analog.cafe/app/film-price…). It’s the only one of this kind. But even this graph is incomplete: it doesn’t factor in the inflation.
This film was long gone from the shelves in the US & Canada (+presumably the EU), yet it was still sold in Japan (see analog.cafe/comments/nfg3 #video🍿)
Fujifilm is famously secretive about its film production lines, at least in the anglophone world (Kosmo Foto’s Stephen Dowling often has to translate Fujifilm’s announcements from Japanese to get the news across). This tight-lipped approach likely gave rise to a conspiracy theory which suggests that Fujifilm stopped making films decades ago, and we’re simply buying frozen stock. (I don’t think it’s true; all evidence points to the contrary).
Dmitri
Dmitri