Price of Paper

[rcjtapio]

I filled up my car with gas today for $1.99 a gallon. It got me wondering if the price of paper will ever come down as silver prices fall? I looked up a 10 year history for the price of silver & it appears we are at about 2008 levels and the trend is downward. Probably just wishful thinking!

[Oren Grad]

Back-of-the-envelope calculation:

Silver currently costs about $0.55 per gram. B&W paper has perhaps 1 to 1.5 gram of silver per square meter of paper. Agfa used to claim 1.5 g / square meter for MCC and MCP, so let's assume 1.5. A square meter is about 1550 square inches of paper, which means the equivalent of just under 20 sheets of 8x10 paper. Call it 20. So there's about 83 cents of silver per 20 sheets of 8x10 paper, or about 4 cents of silver per sheet of 8x10 paper.

A quick peek on the web shows that the price of silver has fallen by about 2/3 over the past few years, which means perhaps 8 cents worth of silver has been taken out of the manufacturing cost of an 8x10 sheet. This assumes no hedging on the part of manufacturers.

[Eric Woodbury]

Must be the price of paper.

Whatever, beats making your own.

[Tin Can]

New traditional wet process paper will never go down in price. Many here are scanning and inkjet printing. Demand is falling.

Costco sells Fuji Premium Inkjet paper as a house brand at under $20 for 150 sheets of 8.5x11. Huge demand and supply. It's good paper also. Try it.

Silver price can move vastly and have no effect on retail prices.

[letchhausen]

The problem is that silver spiked around 2012 and while it's slowly been coming down it's in heavy play as a commodity. There are other projections that it will go up again over the next few years depending on whose crystal ball we look through. After that 2012 spike there were price increases in photo materials. Even as prices come down traditional materials, as Randy said, will not come down because demand is not increasing. I'm just happy currently that prices are stable and materials are available. You want to find something more expensive than silver? Try inkjet cartridges.....yikes!