The Weight of Every Frame: How to Approach the Rising Cost of Film

For film photographers, the current photography landscape is encouraging. After a long period of decline, film photography is healthier and more popular than it has been in years. Manufacturers are investing in capacity and introducing new films again. New cameras are being released. Scanning workflows are more robust and sophisticated. Yet one complaint has surfaced during this resurgence, and it is new: price. Is film too expensive? Many feel that film is becoming unaffordable, a luxury good accessible only to the wealthy.

The emotional appeal of this sentiment is hard to deny, especially in our current economy where inflation is making disposable income a hazy memory of the distant past. Worse, in our daily practice the awareness of film's cost may begin to overdetermine our photographic activity, make us pause before taking a photograph, or take one instead of three. In this piece we want to dig a little deeper into this dilemma, but to do that we first need to take a step back to the turn of the previous century.

In the early 2000s, when the film ecosystem was collapsing, it was a great time to be a photographer. In 2003, there were about 960 million rolls sold. That stock included films we will never see again, like Kodachrome, Polaroid peel-apart film (Type 55 P/N being a landmark material and technical marvel), Fuji Instax in large format, Kodak Readyload and Fuji Quickload, Fuji Provia (and Fuji films in general), Kodak Plus-X and Ektachrome to name a few of the casualties.

Being a mass-produced consumer item, film then was plentiful, in stock, fresh, and cheap. The price of film in this era was itself a mirage, a distortion that rippled through the film industry as digital began to reverse film's fortunes. By 2005 Kodak's film business experienced a 31% decline in sales. During this turbulent time, film producers found themselves saddled with mass-market capacity, sunk investment, excess capacity and distribution, and competition for a shrinking market. The net result was downward pressure on prices. By 2017, sales had fallen by 98%.

In 2005, a roll of Tri-X was around $3.50. I met a former executive from Kodak around this time who couldn't believe it. An industrial-scale production line could not be turned into a boutique one overnight and most of the financial press didn't think Kodak would survive the transition.

Today a roll of Tri-X is about $9.00, almost three times the price. If we accounted for inflation alone, the price should be around $6.00. At first glance it looks like film, as a boutique product, has a hidden tax that makes it prohibitively expensive, or nearly so. But this is not quite the full picture. Let's compare a roll of Tri-X today with the cost of a roll during its heyday.

Tri-X across time

If we go back to 1977, a roll of Tri-X cost $10.73 in 2026 dollars. To view those pictures, you would need to make contact sheets and work prints. This required a darkroom and darkroom equipment. Today we can scan with a relatively inexpensive setup such as the Valoi Easy35. In 1977, amortized over a seven-year period shooting one roll a week, a simple darkroom setup would have cost you around $9.00 per roll in 2026 dollars whereas the scanning solution over the same span of time and output would now cost you $8.72.

The cost of seeing the work

_Modeled over seven years at one 36-exposure roll per week: 364 rolls. The historical workflow assumes one 8×10 contact sheet and four 8×10 workprints from each roll. Film development is excluded from both sides.

Looked at from this fuller perspective, shooting black-and-white film, at least, is no more expensive than it was in 1977.

What a roll costs to make and evaluate

And yet, this does not really alter the fact that film photography today feels too expensive. Some of this has to do with the deflation of previous film prices but a much larger factor comes from the comparison to digital capture, which we experience as free. If shot with the same discipline, digital is cheaper than film and gets cheaper with less discipline. A disciplined digital regimen is around 23 cents a shot whereas film is 56 cents, but the difference feels even greater because with digital we can shoot as many frames as we'd like, and we are aware of this even when we shoot with discipline. The brunt of costs associated with film photography, historically, is not really on our bank account but on our current perception of the activity itself.

One of the consequences of the digital revolution is that it changed how we think about pressing the shutter. Even if we shoot with discipline, we are aware that we can choose not to. No matter how much we slow down and become intentional about how and how often we press the shutter, we can never fully erase the post-digital mindset that a frame should be free.

When Gary Winogrand died in 1984, he left roughly 2,500 rolls undeveloped, along with a much larger body of work he had never fully reviewed. This was difficult for people at the time to understand and it seemed to indicate a fundamental flaw in his character. But today we simply say that Winogrand was the first digital photographer and the dilemma is now commonplace when shooting digitally. The medium may influence this pattern, but the risk always exists that one's ability to create frames may outstrip one's ability to edit them.

Film prices do not necessarily resolve this dilemma on their own. If they impact exploration and automatic shooting is that pressure an obstacle or a corrective? There is no simple formula to determine the ideal balance. The corollary to this dilemma is one we will always need to confront: how much do we edit before the shot and how much after?

Today that decision is still ours to make. We can shoot with Winogrand's abandon or we can use film as a filter and edit in front of the lens. The cost of film in a landscape dominated by free digital frames does have an impact on that choice, but it does even more work defending it.

In other words, we can decide for ourselves what the weight of every frame should be, or what we feel comfortable allowing it to be. Like so much in photography, finally, we have to make choices about how we steer our perception and allow it to guide the work we do.

Endnotes

1. Kodak's Picture-Taking Equipment and Supplies Price Catalog, effective June 24, 1977, lists 36-exposure Tri-X Pan (TX135-36) at $1.95. B&H's June 2005 catalog lists 36-exposure Tri-X at $3.69. B&H currently lists the same 36-exposure film at $8.95. Kodak 1977 price catalog B&H June 2005 catalog Current B&H Tri-X listing
2. Inflation adjustments use the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U. June 1977 was 60.7, June 2005 194.5, and June 2026 333.952. Thus $1.95 in June 1977 equals about $10.73 in June 2026 dollars, while $3.69 in June 2005 equals about $6.34. July 2026 was essentially unchanged at 333.918. BLS historical CPI-U table BLS June 2005 CPI release BLS June 2026 CPI release
3. The historical darkroom is a modeled 1977-era working setup, not a claim that every photographer owned exactly this equipment. The principal capital anchor is a December 1976 retail advertisement listing an Omega B600 with one lens for $114.88 and an Omega Program Timer for $37.88. Nearby-period retail prices and modest estimates are used for the remainder of the necessary equipment. December 9, 1976 period advertisement
4. A January 1979 Photo Factory advertisement provides nearby-period retail prices for the consumable model, including Kodak Polycontrast RC 8×10 paper at $17.99 per 100 sheets, Dektol at $1.37, Kodak Fixer at $1.10, Indicator Stop Bath at $1.77, as well as Polycontrast filters, a contact printer, trays, safelight and other darkroom equipment. For 364 rolls, the model requires 364 contact sheets and 1,456 workprints, or 1,820 sheets of 8×10 paper. Kodak's processing data rate Dektol at about 120 8×10 sheets per gallon of working solution and Kodak Fixer at about 100 sheets per gallon. January 1979 Photo Factory advertisement Kodak 1977 processing data
5. The contemporary camera-scanning model uses a Nikon Zf ($2,199.95), NIKKOR Z MC 50mm f/2.8 ($669.95), VALOI Easy35 v2 ($271) and a $33.95 memory-card allowance, for $3,174.85 total. Amortized across 364 rolls, that is about $8.72 per roll. The model does not assign a separate cost to a computer or editing software. Nikon Zf pricing NIKKOR Z MC 50mm pricing VALOI Easy35 v2
6. "The film market peaked in 2003 with 960 million rolls of film, today [2017] it represents roughly 2% of that,” says Manny Almeida, president of Fujifilm’s imaging division in North America." https://time.com/4649188/film-photography-industry-comeback/