The Costs Involved - Printing

Salutations from one of the coldest places in Australia today! I awoke to find that the thermometer was sitting at a comfortable –9*C, and that everything was cold (apart from the fire which was happily burning away). I didn’t go out and take photos, mainly because I need to get a pair of gloves so that I don’t freeze my fingers off. I found a really good spot to go and take photos too – so you should see some of them after tomorrow morning. But let’s get onto the actual reason for today’s post.

If anyone tells you that digital has almost no costs after you buy the camera, they are out of their mind. This may be true for the full-blown addicted face-booker who loves showing happy snaps of their holiday to the world, but there are and will be costs involved for digital if you actually want to look at your pictures in real-life and show them to others. I will explain the costs of printing shots today.

The main cost with digital is the cost of printing photos (let’s assume that you’re happy with using the lens that your camera came with). Many digital photo printing services are cheap – the place where I get mine printed from offers 15c prints all year round, and often knocks that down to 9c a print. You are probably smirking at me now, thinking “But that’s not much”. The cost of prints goes up the larger the print big time. The place where I get my shots printed offers 15c per 4x6”, 50c per 5x7”, $2.95 per 6x8”, and $3.95 per 8x10” and 8x12”. I get all my better shots printed as 4x6’s but the really good ones also done as 8x12’s.  Can you start to see that if you want to see the detail that your $1000+ camera gives you you will have to spend money? My last order included 53 4x6’s and 14 8x12’s – all for a total of just under $70.00 (including postage). And that’s from one weekend of shooting!

Film is also costly. You have to by the film (which you can get for as low as $4.00 per 3 pack, but for good stuff be prepared to pay $30+) and then get the film processed – all pretty big costs. But I can buy a pretty good film SLR for around $100, which is a saving of $900 on my D5000. A quick search on Google and I’ve just found a company in Australia who will process film for the following prices:

Size	Cost per roll (up to 36 exp)	Relative cost per shot (for 36 shots)
4x6”	$9.95	28c
5x7”	$13.95	39c
6x8”	$17.95	50c

Want that film on CD so you can edit and store your shots? Just add $4.95 to the processing costs. That would increase the price of a whole roll of 6x8’s to 64c per shot. PLUS the $100 film camera you purchased will take just a high (if not much higher) resolution shots than your digital SLR.

 

The message for today? Film is still as competitive as digital as far as the costs of printing are concerned. I can get 50c 6x8” prints for film whilst paying $2.95 per digital shot. Interesting, isn’t it?