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To: long-gone who wrote (80218)	12/26/2001 9:34:54 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116925

You aren't doing the numbers on those alternatives. They won't pick up the slack which will continue to widen in this biggest use of silver. Also, there are better alternatives in material print usages than silver. Silver carries with it a small environmental problem where alternatives don't. We are headed for a metal-less society. That includes steel too.

To: long-gone who wrote (80218)	12/26/2001 11:10:46 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 116925

There have sprung up a great many companies which custom print digital photos onto a silver based paper! Its a last ditch attempt by the companies that sell light sensitive materials to stay in the business of selling photographic paper and the attendant chemicals and machines needed to process them. Its also a concession to the photographic industry who has a deep distrust and resistance of all things digital. You have to understand that photography process has remained almost completely unchanged over the last 20-30 years. You can still fire up a machine that is 25 years old and process paper made yesterday. Contrast that with the constantly changing landscape created by digital printers. The thing that dooms color photographic prints is the resin coated paper that the image resides on. The dyes are next. Only Cibachrome material is anywhere near archival because it uses azo dyes and mylar base, but Cibachrome is expensive and difficult to work with and it only works from slides. One can print a digital image now from an $800 Epson that has a 300 year dark keeping quality, mostly because you can put the image on acid free archival paper, but there has been a vast improvement in the dyes used in digital printers. Kodak says its C print material (negatives are all printed on C material)lasts 70 years and that is the biggest joke in the photographic business. One can hang them on the wall in the light and watch the base change from white to yellow in about three weeks, if you put them in a dark dry place they'll last a little longer before the base turns (most people order borderless prints so this effect isn't noticed by the public), they have considerably better keeping under plexiglass but nothing close to the keeping quality that black and white images made on archival paper have, but the B&W market is all artists and commercial, not consumer. the silver in photos will be less available fore reclamation than from the prior negatives / slides. Only B&W prints retain any silver in them and a lot of that is fixed out in processing, the amount remaining depends on the density of the print (ie: shadow areas to highlights). In color the silver is bleached out and can be reclaimed. Not 100% because there is always some loss, the silver is replaced by the dyes that form the image. Photography not only provides a demand for silver but it is also a source of supply because the reclamation rate is relatively high in this country. Its not as high as it could be because the labs tend to think of silver recovery as an expense rather than a source of income, the EPA forces labs to recover. When the price of silver was high in the seventies there was an enormous effort made to reclaim silver. If silver price rises again, you can expect reclamation efforts to rise again. There's a lot of silver thrown out in the lab environment. There's also a lot of silver bricks sitting on desk tops holding down paper and used as doorstops as well. I've never been in a lab that didn't have a few ingots laying around.