Digital BW, The Print

Jennifer, here's my take on the carbon print value issue.

A print's value is determined by the market. The market consists of 
all the potential buyers of our prints. Many of these individual 
buyers are, more often than not, habitual. The baggage they carry 
includes perceptions, preconceived notions, and old habits that are 
really difficult to change. There has to be one or more reasons for 
each individual buyer to change his/her habits.

A market like ours does change, not so much because the individual 
buyers change their likes and dislikes, but because the newcomers to 
the market have different likes and dislikes (and probably an 
entirely different perspective) than the old-timers who are leaving 
the market. As long as silver prints are available, the inroads that 
carbon prints make into that traditional silver print market will 
probably be slow. However, the relative values of various types of 
prints is almost guaranteed to change simply because the individuals 
who make up the market change over time. The newcomers may have just 
as much baggage as the old-timers, but it'll be different because the 
newcomers' life experiences and perspective on the market will be 
different. And the values they place on the prints they buy are 
likely to be different as well.

Consider the effort Heinz is making to sell green and purple ketchup. 
They're selling (presumably) to the buyers of red ketchup. It's just 
a matter of substitution. Why should a buyer of ketchup switch from 
the traditional red ketchup? How many traditional red ketchup users 
are likely to switch, even temporarily? Why should they switch, as 
long as the traditional red ketchup is available? Some of us may 
place a higher value on the red ketchup simply because we are 
familiar with it, or for other reasons that have nothing at all to do 
with the quality of the product.

Another way to look at this: Markets have momentum and can be as 
difficult to turn as a supertanker. Changing our print market (and 
the relative values of the products within it) quickly would require 
that we change the minds of the majority of print buyers regarding 
the relative merits of the available products. That's not a small 
task. Each of us has a method of determining value and we each do it 
somewhat differently. Ultimately, it's the aggregation of our 
individual valuations that determines the market valuation.

I think we just have to be patient...

Tom Keesling
Intelligent Design, Inc.


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "jennifer drucker" 
<jdrucker@j...> wrote:
> Some additional thoughts...
> 
> So why, other than a bit of time, and the fact that one is done in 
the dark with chemcials, the other in daylight with inks is a digital 
print any less valuable than that of a silver print? I may understand 
it 10 years from now when there are fewer and fewer silver prints 
being made thus making them rare, but right now I just don't see it.