Xerox Corp. created a sensation at a printing industry exhibition at McCormick Place Monday, promising to deliver a future for photography free of chemicals or silver compounds, which increasingly are coming under environmental regulation.
The news sent world silver prices tumbling.
The company, introducing the product at Graph Expo, said its new VerdeFilm will render “obsolete silver halide film and provide an environmentally sound alternative for many applications in the printing industry.”
Although the announcement focused only on a product designed for commercial printing applications, there was immediate speculation that the technology would change all aspects of photography, just as Xerox’s copy machines changed the face of office duplicating three decades ago.
The Xerox announcement noted that because it uses heat instead of chemicals to make photographic images, VerdeFilm produces images that are sharper than silver halide film, removing “the environmental hazards and costs associated with conventional chemical film processing.”
The company added, “VerdeFilm requires no special handling or storage and is not affected by accidental exposure to daylight.”
With Chicago among the three largest centers of commercial printing in the United States, Xerox introduced the product at a trade show where many printing executives said such a chemical-free process could save as much as 15 percent of their film costs.
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But concern focused on silver markets and on battered Eastman Kodak Co., the world’s largest maker of silver halide film and thus the most likely to be hurt if Xerox’s promises are realized.
With well over one-third of the world’s silver consumption going to photographic and other graphic-related uses, the announcement triggered a flurry of speculation as analysts raced to put the development in perspective.
Silver prices dropped 17.2 cents, to $4.22, on the news, their lowest level in four weeks. Xerox stock was up 75 cents, to $80. Kodak shares dropped $1.13, to $61.75.
Kodak executives refused to comment on the Xerox news.
The film portion of printing already is undergoing radical changes from the combination of computers and digitization, the precise reduction of information to units that can be processed quickly by computer.
The immediate savings from the Xerox process are significant but not overwhelming. An executive with a small printing firm, with revenues of about $6 million, said he usually figures film chemicals add about 10 percent to film costs. For his company, that means an annual bill of $150,000 for film and $15,000 for chemicals.
John Lutley of the Gold and Silver Mining Institute in Washington, D.C., said that while photography is a major source of silver sales, the printing processes targeted by 3M and the Xerox process account for only about 3 percent of U.S. silver production.
Medical and industrial X-rays account for about 33 percent and amateur and professional photography for 31 percent of silver used for photography.
A Xerox spokesman said that the company believes the process could eventually be applied to ordinary cameras, but that it knows of “no company exploring that application at this time.”
VerdeFilm works by using the element selenium in place of silver. The selenium isn’t sensitive to light until it is exposed to an electrical field. That means film can be loaded in direct light. The image is created by heating the selenium, instead of the chemical-etching process in which silver is deposited on film.