Film & Economics
On Silver
Excuse me whilst I head across to kentmere (or what’s the price of silver got to do with it)……
Has the price of HP5 film risen as dramatically as I think it has?
Yes — and the dominant reason is silver, the single biggest raw input in any traditional silver-halide film.
Silver has been on an extraordinary tear. It started 2025 at roughly $30 an ounce and had more than doubled by the start of 2026, reaching around $79, (finance.yahoo.com/perso… before spiking to a nominal all-time high of $121.67 on 29 January 2026. (apmex.com/silver-price It rose by more than 130% over 2025, (jpmorgan.com/insights/g… driven by industrial demand (solar especially), a multi-year structural supply deficit, safe-haven buying amid the US-Iran conflict, and tariff uncertainty. For a product where silver halide is the core of the emulsion, a doubling-plus of your main feedstock in roughly a year feeds straight through to the shelf price, even with a lag.
That maps neatly onto what shooters have actually seen. One UK account had a 36-exposure roll of HP5+ sitting at £5.65 last year and still the same as late as June, then jumping to £7.15 by October (the3rs.uk/film-price-ri… — and noted the oddity that HP5 was verging on twice the cost of Kentmere despite both being made in the same factory by the same company using very similar emulsions.( the3rs.uk/film-price-ri… ) Harman appears to be defending margin on its premium-branded lines while keeping the budget Kentmere range as the value play.
The secondary factors stack on top of silver: persistent inflation across input costs (gelatine, the acetate/PET base, energy, transport), tariffs acting as a buyer-side tax in some markets, and the structural problem that film is a low-volume niche product now — lower aggregate demand means fixed production costs get spread over fewer rolls. photrio.com/forum/threa… Harman’s historic price-rise notices have leaned on inflation, global supply chain challenges and increased transport costs kosmofoto.com/2022/03/n… as the stated causes.
Worth noting silver has since pulled back — to around $66–67 an ounce by June 2026goldsilver.com/industry… — so the January spike was the acute squeeze. Film pricing rarely ratchets back down to match, though, so the elevated level is likely to stick for a while. If the premium has finally tipped HP5 past your comfort line, Kentmere 400 out of the same plant remains the obvious value substitute, with Tri-X and Fomapan 400 as the other usual suspects.