Bad news if you’re a film shooter and Fujifilm is your brand of choice: the company has announced that it will be increasing the worldwide price of its entire line of photographic films starting in May 2012. In the announcement, the company blames demand and economics for the decision:
The demand for film products is continuously decreasing, yen’s appreciation and the cost of production, such as raw materials, oil and energy, continues to rise or stay at high level. Under such circumstances, despite our effort to maintain the production cost, Fujifilm is unable to absorb these costs during the production process and is forced to pass on price increases. To sustain its photo imaging business, Fujifilm has decided to increase the price of photographic films.
Fujifilm remains committed to photographic products and asserts that even with the new price. Its photographic products remain exceptionally good value compared with other system products.
While the announcement doesn’t mention how much prices will increase by — they state that it will vary depending on market — Fuji Rumors reports that it will be an increase of over 10%.
(via Fujifilm via Fuji Rumors via Mirrorless Rumors)
Image credit: Roll On by Looking Glass
Kodak’s film business just can’t seem to catch a break. One week the company announced the death of its entire slide film lineup, Kodak announced today that it is increasing the price of all the surviving films by 15%, stating,
We have to contend with further increases in energy and raw material costs, and higher costs associated with lower volumes.
Therefore, to remain a sustainable, viable business, the company is implementing a price increase for consumer and professional films.
(via Amateur Photographer via Photo Rumors)
Image credit: film by ka_tate
In an announcement on the Google Photos Blog today, Google announced that the maximum number of albums allowed for a Picasa account has been increased from 1,000 to 10,000.
While this is “good news” for everyone who uses the service, I wonder what percentage of users this actually benefits. Some statistics on Picasa usage would have been an interesting and illuminating addition to the announcement:
We want Picasa Web Albums to be a place you can share and store all your digital photos, regardless of how many you have. We recently made extra storage really affordable, but until now, Picasa Web accounts have been limited to a maximum of 1,000 albums. We heard that you needed more room, and because we want you to keep sharing your photos and posting them to Buzz, we’ve worked hard to now raise this limit to 10,000 albums.
Expect Google to continue beefing up Picasa in 2010 in order to seriously challenge Flickr for a bigger slice of the photo sharing pie.
