The argument for physical media: Part one

Hardcopy derives its name from a love for physical media. There’s a constant battle within me between the love of beautiful things on a shelf, and the aesthetic joy of a professionally shot and produced Youtube video about minimalism. 

But ultimately - it’s the physical media that wins out. I understand, in the world we live in now, there’s many arguments against physical media. USB sticks are becoming a retro nostalgic item, new cars haven’t had any form of physical media slot for years, and the Switch 2 launched this week with news that the physical game cards they sell may not even have the games on them - in favour of digital downloads. 

There’s three key reasons why I see this switch to online media happening - financial, environmental and convenience. Today I’m curious whether, when we look at the maths, the financial argument rings true. 

I love shooting film photography. But there's a pretty hefty financial argument against it. Why spend money buying film and getting it professionally developed, when I can take a seemingly infinite number of photos for free on my phone. 

But can I? I decided to run some numbers. 

Every time you take a digital photo, it is stored somewhere. For those of us who don’t have infinite storage on our phones, or want this photo to be backed up somewhere, this is in the cloud. 

I took a bunch of photos this morning on a walk. Each of these photos on my Samsung Galaxy S22 is roughly 8.19MB.

Now, I’m terrible at deleting the photos off my camera reel. So, this photo is likely to stick around for a long time. Due to the seamless integration on my phone, it will eventually be uploaded to Google as a backup without me even thinking about it.

Google storage costs $3.49 per month for 100GB. Less than a coffee. Bargain.

Put another way, one megabyte is $0.0000349 per month. This sweaty walk photo, in all its 8.19MB will therefore cost $0.0000349 * 8.19 = $0.000285831 to store for a month.

However, once this photo is in Google, I’ll never see it again. I’ll use the Google photos search feature to conveniently find the photos I want in future, and if the search function works well (and I hear Google is pretty good at those), this photo will never pop up unless I decide to one day nostalgically search through old neighbourhood walk photos. But it will still be there.

I am 28 years old, so I hope to look back on my photos for at least the next 50 years. That’s 600 months. 600 * 0.000285831 is $0.0.1714986 - which is roughly 17 cents. That means, over the next 50 years, this Sunday morning selfie will cost me 17 cents. That’s beginning to become tangible. 

Especially when I admit I didn’t take one photo. I took 15. The lighting of the first wasn’t quite right, the second was a little blurry, and in the third I had a bit of hair on my face. I took photos in multiple spots because I thought the second (and then third) locations were actually better than the first. And I’ll admit one more thing - I didn’t go back and delete any from my phone. Why would I when storage seems endless? 

15 photos at 17c each is $2.55. At my local photo store, it costs $35 for a roll of 24 shots of film, including scanning and development. That’s $1.45 per photo. Factor in a very generous $1.05 for a 6x4 inch print and we can call this even with my walk shooting spree. 

When I shoot in film, I carefully think about each shot. I wait for the perfect moment to capture something that has genuinely delighted me. I probably wouldn’t have taken a photo on my morning neighbourhood walk - and that probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. When I get each of those photos back, I show my friends, I print them out and put them on the wall, and I imagine looking back on them for the next 50 years. 

There’s a lot of assumptions made in my maths (and likely some ignorant exaggerations in the quest to make my point). And maybe all of you carefully go back and delete your photos each time you screenshot something to send to a friend, take a bunch of selfies or photograph your unused items to list on TradeMe. 

But my point is once we own something once, we really own it. Not only that, but we get to spend our money at film shops down the road from our house, not Google. Subscription models convince us we’re getting a bargain, and our habits adapt to it. 

Once our habits change, we are trapped. If my local film shop decides to increase the cost of their 24 shot rolls from $35 to $37, I can choose to buy my film elsewhere, but if Google ups their monthly price for 100GB of storage from $3.49 to $3.69, there’s no way I’m moving all my photos for the sake of 20c. If they hike this price by 20c each year, fifty years would see me spending more than $5000 on storage. And that's assuming my storage needs don't increase (although my photo taking habits would suggest this also goes up linearly).

As phones get better and better, the photos on our phones take up even more storage. Again, without us even really knowing. This leads to a greater spend on storage. Intriguing to note, the people who make the phone cameras we use, that get better and better (and make larger and larger photos) each year (Google and Apple) also own the storage tools we subscribe to. 

I’ll stop short of putting my tinfoil hat on, but it gives something to ponder.

That being said, I’d like to thank Google Drive for giving me a place to write this article.