Word: kodaking
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Camera buffs may continue urging subjects to "Smile," but there probably will be little smiling on the other side of the shutter. Reacting to the rise in the price of silver from $6 per oz. to a high of $41.50 over the past year, Kodak last week announced increases of up to 75% on its whole line of film products. A twelve-exposure cassette of Kodacolor II, for example, went from $1.86 to $2.15, and a 36-picture roll of Kodachrome slides jumped from $4.40 to $5.29. The steepest increases were for graphic arts films and photo typesetting paper used...
...Kodak is experimenting with ways to reduce the silver content of film, but scientists have yet to find any other material as sensitive to tight. With black and white film, the image is etched into grains of silver salts coated on the thin piece of plastic. Silver also captures the original image for color pictures, but is later replaced by colored dyes during development. Nonsilver film is being manufactured, though it is used primarily for slow-exposure microfilm. In all, the photo industry accounts for nearly half of the 160 million oz. of silver that the nation consumes annually...
While waiting and hoping for silver prices to decline, Kodak has stepped up its recycling procedures. The company already recovers 20 million oz. of the metal a year in processing amateur film and in scrap from its manufacturing operations. Even the silver that is punched out to make the tiny sprocket holes on 35-mm and home-movie film is meticulously collected and used again...
That policy could be risky. Rising metals prices feed inflation by pushing up costs for a range of products and processes. Last week, for example, Kodak (1978 sales: $7.1 billion) announced a 7.5% jump in its retail film prices to help offset the rise in the cost of silver, which could add nearly $1.5 billion to the company's overhead this year. The largest users of industrial silver are hospitals, which require vast quantities for X-ray film. When the prices go up, hospital costs rise, insurance premiums climb, and federal Medicare and Medicaid outlays, already among the biggest...
...Sonys, the industry's standard of excellence, whose sales are up substantially. At Beverly Hills' trendy Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf shop, the all-metal $99.50 Eva brand coffee maker outsells by 3 to 1 the part plastic $79.95 Braun coffee brewer. Sales of Kodak's low-priced Instamatic cameras have been sluggish, but sales are really clicking for Nikon, Olympus and Canon cameras, which retail for some $250 and up, and provide all the features that most people are ever likely to want in a lifetime. The understated lines and craftsmanship of the Cartier tank watch...