Kodak price increase

On a related topic to my previous post, Kodak is increasing the price of their film by as much as 17 percent.

The company cited rising costs for raw materials such as silver and petrochemicals. The company also attributed the price increases to growing expenses for packaging and transportation, which are tied to higher energy costs.

I suppose you can also expect the shops to add on a little increase of their own so I expect the price of film will go up at least 20 percent. Lets not forget that as more people switch to digital the declining economies of scale will start to drive the price of film up even further. In the medium term film will probably only be sold in specialist camera shops with most other shops switching over to digital printing kiosks.

I'll use my film SLR on my trip to Australia later this year because I don't want to bring an expensive digital SLR, and lets face it even "cheap" digital SLRs are expensive, but I think that will be the last time I use film for general use.