Once you start purchasing silver to use in a process you will quickly come to grip with the true cost of silver per print. For example Bostick & Sullivan sells a premixed 250mL Vandyke sensitizer solution that will coat ~ 125 8x10 prints for $42.95. That works out to about .34 per print. True there are other chemicals in the solution so the actual cost per print of the silver will be somewhat less. Last week I mixed a sensetizer for Kallitypes which requires a 10% solution of silver nitrate (10gms/100mL). The silver nitrate cost me $30 for 30 grams or $1 per gram and it takes about 40 drops of the silver to coat an 8x10 sheet. Figure 20 drops/mL and the cost to coat one 8x10 print with the silver is about twenty cents. Since 16x20 is a factor of 4, then it would cost me about 90 cents to coat one 16x20 print. (Note: The kallitype also calls for an equal amount of ferric oxalate solution so the actual cost of coating each print would be close to double that of the silver alone.) True Kodak and other manufactures buys silver by the bar and make their own silver solutions rather than buy them like I do but their costs is not as infinitesimal as you might think.If you think there's more than 5 cents worth of silver and gelatin in a sheet of 16x20 paper, you've been misled by industry mystique. The quantities are infinitesimal.
And thats just the cost to coat one sheet. My cost for a sheet of 140-lb 22x30 Fabriano Aristrico paper is around $6.86 per sheet. I can get 6 9x11 sheets from that on which to print an 8x10 negative. That bring the paper cost to $1.14 per 8x10 print for a total of around $1.55 for one 8x10 sheet of coated paper. Further costs on top of that would be for the developer and fixer.
Thomas
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