GREEN AND YELLOW GIANTS RAISE PRICES!

•  Green & Yellow giants Raise Prices! – The two surviving giants of the traditional photo industry, Fujifilm and Kodak, have both announced massive global price hikes in film and paper. The increases are blamed on factors including global commodities costs – particularly of oil, but also of silver. They become effective by July this year.

Photographers and photo labs are facing a double whammy: not only are analogue materials going up, but most manufacturers' synthetic papers have gone up too. These are used in dye sub printers, photo kiosks and booths, and in ID photo systems. Even the cost of inkjet inks is going up! The increases are as high as an eye-watering twenty per cent in some cases! In the UK these rises can be exacerbated by the weakness of the pound against the euro, which adds to the cost of transferring continental stocks into this country.

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EPSON SUPPLIES TO GO UP!

• EPSON Supplies To Go Up! – Epson is the latest manufacturer to give advance notice of UK price increases forced by the weakness of the pound against the Euro. From the beginning of June the cost of many Epson inks – including Ultrachrome K3 – will go up, by as much as 15 Per Cent in some cases![add comment]

DARLINGS GREEN BUDGET OFFERS LITTLE!

• Darling's Green Budget Offers Little to Small Business! – As expected, there was little for the self-employed and independent small business people in Alistair Darling's "green" budget last week. And the Chancellor was so restricted by circumstances that even his vaunted "green" measures appeared only in watered-down or deferred versions. [expand story >>>]

Fuel duty rises are deferred. The changes to Capital Gains Tax will now include Entrepreneur's Relief in place of the old Taper Relief. Income shifting for husband and wife teams is retained. There will be modest increases in how much we can hold in ISAs. And there will be a fund to encourage more women entrepreneurs.

So, not much for us. But what about consumers, our customers, the bread and butter? New household formation is the driver of any economy – social photographers know that viscerally. Our customers get married (click! click! click!), they have children (click!), buy bigger houses, with new walls to hang portraits on (£Kching!), put the kids through school (click! click! click!), the kids leave and have a prom (click! click! click!), do embarrassing things in night clubs (@@@@!), graduate Uni (click!), and eventually produce grandchildren (click! click!) or form civil partnerships (click!), or get divorced (bummer! – divorce photography hasn't taken off yet!).

We depend on how easy it is for them to do all that. And at the moment, it doesn't look like it's getting easier. There are a lot of dark clouds gathering over the lives of our Mr. and Ms. Bread and Butter – house prices, interest rates, inflation, credit squeezes, recession. Mr. Darling's budget hasn't done much for us, and it hasn't done much for the bread and butter either.

The best that can be said of the budget is that No. 11 has recognized the weather warning, and hasn't pressed ahead with measures that, in the current circumstances, would just have made things worse. [add comment]