re: silver - some thoughts
G'day groundzero Interesting what you say about the replacement thing, there always seems to be bearish statements about silver in photography when the silver price moves up. If you read the pertenent part of the second article below I think you'll find it interesting. In a nutshell, the segment "photographic uses" component of silver demand includes a number of areas including industrial and medical xrays which are not all that efficient in recycling silver, the segment that digital cameras impact on is mainly consumer colour photography which is quite efficient at recycling 80 - 85%. The recycled silver is also counted as part of supply. Now according to his sums and relying on memory if colour photography was completely replaced by digital it would only reduce demand by 3% (maybe it was 5%?). This does not allow for the silver in the computers, cd's, cameras and if you want to print them on photographic paper that contains??? yep, silver. In recent years silver based photography has had a boost from asian demand. In any case the far more to silver than photographic uses, more uses being found as I type :-) cheers Rod
