price of pt/pd printing

Good eeeevveeeening,

Well, while Dan B. is chitchatting away to Europe on free internet phones, I
am having a ball printing palladium. After gum printing for 2 years solid,
I am taking a breather with this ironic idea of the blurry family photo
album. I decided I was sick and tired of happy smiley family albums (when
dysfunctional families abound), and that I would make my own album that
would last 400 years--as pt/pd would--for all posterity to see (probably
only to see how weird their great great great great grandma was). So I'm
printing a bunch of snapshotty type imagery, blurry, angsty, unpoetic and
the like, in 4x6 size, tipped into a black handmade photo album with photo
corners. Sam thinks I am nuts, I'm sure.

So as I was basking in my oh-so-very-postmodern irony of printing **this**
type of imagery in pt/pd, I suddenly freaked about just how much this will
ultimately cost. I sat with calculator, droppers, ml graduates, anything to
avoid facing my final thesis corrections.

This is what I figured, and I am asking all you perfect(ly normal) pt/pd
printers out there if these calcs seem reasonable:
A 4x6 print with magic brush takes 13 drops (i love that magic brush).
A price per drop (B and S pricing at the small quantity 25 ml price) was:
2 cents ferric,
13 cents palladium,
and 6 cents Na2.

Thus a 4x6 costs 96 cents. At the 100 ml price it is only 64 cents.
Heck, that isn't bad at all, given diginegs with curves that give
predictable prints!
So my blurry family photo album will really only cost me about 4 times as
much as if I had it printed at Walmart! And it'll last 8 times as long!

Of course this doesn't include the price of ammonium citrate, citric acid,
EDTA, Pictorico, paper, depreciation of the magic brush, replacing worn BL
bulbs, electricity, time, ink, depreciation of my computer and my
printer....

Deep thoughts for the night--I really should have gone to bed long ago....
Chris
Received on Thu Apr 7 21:58:15 2005