Market research

We ponder the economic future of the past.

Our photographer was recently asked about three film cameras a friend had inherited, and was contemplating selling.  What would be a fair price for them?  His first reaction was that he was not a used-camera dealer, and so could not give an authoritative answer.  But his friend insisted, and our photographer realized he probably had more insight than most, so he started doing some investigating.

[Actually his first reaction was that these were decent cameras in good shape, and so should be used.  But using film cameras these days is not for everyone.  He kept this reaction to himself.]

Any economist will tell you that the price of something is what you can get someone to give you for it.  This assumes (there are a lot of assumptions in economics) that there is some kind of a market.  For these particular cameras, that was hard to establish.  While each was reasonably well-known and of decent quality, none had been produced in enough numbers to survive in quantity today, at least quantities large enough to trade regularly.  Asking prices on some websites were clearly fantastic; other prices depended greatly on condition.  That’s expected for goods manufactured in the middle of the last century.  With a side glance at what similar cameras were fetching (we can have a long argument about what is “similar”), our photographer was eventually willing to give an answer.

But it raised the general question of the economics of film equipment.  A few years ago our photographer acquired an enlarger, a piece of equipment used to make prints from negatives.  He hasn’t been able to set up a darkroom, so it remains unused.  But the point is he paid nothing for it.  Someone was willing to get rid of it for free, just to get it to a photographer who intended to use it.  The thought then came to him: suppose an entrepreneur had a large, air-conditioned warehouse somewhere (it need not be in any special location).  At that particular time he could have snapped up enlargers and other darkroom gear in quantity, for negligible expense.  For a larger investment, he could pick up cameras and other film photography bits and pieces in good shape, and store them also.

Then, assuming he had the wherewithal to keep the warehouse in operation, he would bide his time.  Eventually the film equipment in the hands of active users would wear out, and the experts who could repair them retire, or throw up their hands.  There would be a demand for this archaic technology, and by opening up the warehouse he could make it available (at a reasonable profit, of course).

We’re not entirely sure it would work.  Certainly, waiting for well-built mechanical cameras to break requires a great deal of patience.  But there’s another reason we can think of, and it generates more hope than despair.

The manufacture of precision instruments is not what it was a century, even a half-century, ago.  Computer-controlled machinery, including 3D printing, has largely replaced the skilled machinist at the lathe.  We can imagine that the specifications for a 1955 Praktica (which must exist somewhere) could someday be fed into industrial software, which would produce a quite functional version of the camera your great-grandfather used.  If there’s a market for it.