Film Price Trends

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AVERAGE (Global)
AVERAGE (Black & White)
AVERAGE (Colour)

Stores surveyed:

What is this?

Film Price Trends is a research tool for anyone interested in understanding trends in costs and availability of popular film stocks. This app graphs six-plus years of data about film prices.

Use it to find films that cost less this year than they did previously. Compare average seller offers to get the best deal on your stock. Discover reliable emulsions impervious to inflation.

Film Price Trends provides the most complete overview of the analogue photographic market, with data going back to 2018. It’s the best way to observe more than 470,000,000 rolls of film (~$7.2B) changing hands annually.

How to use this app.

The graph shows the AVERAGE film price for all the film stocks and stores that sell it in your currency across several years.

You can drag your mouse or your finger over various points on the graph to see the exact average film price at a particular date. The tooltip that appears will also show you the cheapest and most expensive film at that time.

Switch to Black & White or Colour film AVERAGE graph to how each of the film categories behaves. For example, August 2024 shows a notable decrease in the AVERAGE Colour film prices and a slight increase in AVERAGE Black & White film prices.

You can hide the AVERAGE graph by toggling the active AVERAGE switch.

If you have a GOLD membership, you can drill down to all individual film prices by switching them on and off. You can graph up to 10 films at once. Drag your mouse or your finger over various points on the individual film graphs to compare store prices for that date. You can also observe grouped averages, such as one for colour film vs black-and-white film.

✪ Note: If you switch your currency, the graphs will change slightly. This is because the true exchange rates vary by date. For example, if your currency is stronger in a particular year, your relative film price will be lower.

About the data.

The individual prices were collected in various currencies, which were all converted to Canadian dollars using the exchange rate at the time they were surveyed. All values are then converted to your local currency using a recent exchange rate.

All film prices are for single rolls of 35mm film with 36 exposures. Bulk discounts are ignored, but sale prices are used instead of regular prices. Prices for films that are listed but out of stock are also recorded. Kodak Portra films are sold almost exclusively in packs of five (this started happening around 2022); I use that price divided by five.

Film Price Reports is a twice-yearly email newsletter in which I outline the latest trends and discuss new insights from fresh data on film prices.

Calculating the size of the film photography market.

Neither Kodak nor Fujifilm reports granular data about the number of rolls of film sold each year. Even if they did, we still wouldn’t know about other producers like ORWO, expired film sales, and other formats.

But it’s still helpful to get a general idea, even if it’s not precise. So I dug through old news articles to get estimates shared by execs and used that data to build a conservative estimate.

Here’s what I found:

The January 2017 article in TIME magazine quoted Manny Almeida (president of Fujifilm’s imaging division in North America) suggesting that his employer is selling “roughly” 2% (b) of their 2003 peak of 960 million rolls of film (a). The same article quotes Giles Branthwaite (the sales and marketing director at Harman), who “sees” a 5% (c) annual growth. 5% growth is a low-end estimate as Marketplace quotes a 20% year-over-year growth in patronage at The Darkroom, as stated by its co-owner, Phil Steblay. I assume that Fujifilm sells about 30% (e) of all 35mm film.

Putting all that together, it’s a × b × c × d × e, where d is seven years since 2017 as of this writing or 960,000,000 × 0.02 × 1.05 × 7 × 3.33 = 469,929,600 rolls of film sold per year.

The average price of a roll of 35mm film with 36 exposures is $15.30 (according to the August 2024 data I collected for this app). Multiplied by the total sales of 470M, we get $7.2B annually.

Note that the above calculations don’t include instant film and sheet formats. This data is so conservative that it’s probably safe to double it.

Let’s say the above estimates are correct and make another assumption: an average film photographer shoots ten rolls of film per year. In that case, there are 4.7 million film photographers out there today.

This post is for GOLD members.

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