Bad for the environment though. When I worked in 1-hour photo those plastic bits went straight to the trash after extracting the film.

But have you thought about the shareholders?

Can we put the shareholders outside the environment?

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)

Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 15 years. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2024/04/17/earth-day-2024-p...

it's an issue.

Disposable garbage cameras aside.. World population was around 3 billion in 1960s, now it is more than 8 billion.

More people means more plastic is manufactured.

Note: I dont say anything against recycling, in fact we should do it.

Maybe we should replace plastic with aluminium where possible and reusable glassware

Recycling just doesn't work for plastics. If anything, the only parts of the recycling system that are functional today are for paper, glass and metal.

Internalize profits, externalize costs.

Can we for once, put our energy and time behind making things that last?

When I worked in 1-hour photo, the inner metal+plastic 35mm film cans all went into one barrel, the outer 35mm plastic canisters all went into another barrel, and the disposable cameras all went into a third barrel.

These were kept separated, bagged up as needed, and the bags were picked up by the Kodak truck at night along with all of the send-out orders.

Alot of film cameras exploded in price the last 10 years. You might realistically drop a few hundred dollars on a decent film point and shoot now.

They exploded in price especially when the pandemic hit and haven't dropped since.

It feels like the same disease that hit GPUs then has spread not just to film cameras, but to every retro computing or digital gadget like CRT TVs/monitors, 15 year old laptops, consoles and DSLRs.

Everyone now thinks their old commodity e-waste that's not even rare is now worth it's weight in gold on ebay.

If it is, it's because people are paying for it. This is easy to check on eBay via completed listings. The market may be irrational, but if sellers were just setting expectations too high you'd expect competition to pull the price downward.

The problem is likely that people selling on eBay or used camera places handling old bodies are mostly not dealing in functional but “rough” gear. I’m probably typical in that I have one or two old camera bodies at home that aren’t worth selling but still work fine.

I mean sure, but people are paying for it because now the whole market collectively jacked up the prices by 400% so you have no other choice but to buy at 400% or GTFO.

Your only choice of striking a good deal now is a yard sale or something, because online, the market ahs colluded to price fixing as if every customer is a nostalgic with deep pockets.

Personally, I'm not paying, because I refuse to fork up insane markups just to satisfy the nostalgia itch, but obviously some people are.

There are collectible and semi-collectible cameras. I have to believe you can get a serviceable SLR with a 50mm or kit zoom for a decent price.

I have a couple of Pentax PC35AF. Great little cameras but I had to do some real bargain hunting to get them cheaper than a disposable.

Film is so damn expensive these days too! A disposable 400TX with 27 frames is about £15, and a 36 of the same stock is about £12.50 I think.

> Film is so damn expensive these days too!

It's no longer a mass produced item, so the same thing that makes a phone cheap is not available in the film business.

It was never cheap. I liked photography from an early age but did less than I wanted because film was expensive. Digital cameras were a big breakthrough for me, although I still prefer to look of film.