Film vs. Digital

[Steve_S]

...

With regular backups made, and data verification enabled, you should never lose digital photos.

Perhaps you should read this. And then go and make prints of the photos that important to you. Just make sure you print them on archival (acid free) paper with permanent pigments.

With due respect, I see nothing in that article that suggests that data cannot be kept forever, nor prevented from becoming corrupt. What the article appears to be stating is that in the future there will be difficulties sorting through all the data that is progressively building up, and that technologies may change making it impossible to recover data stored in a proprietary or hardware-dependent format. It does state that floppy discs don't last forever but no one backs up important data on floppy discs, or even on CDs.

JPG images are in no danger of becoming obsolete in the next 100 years. Even after we move on to bigger and better things, JPG images will be easily viewed, and able to be converted to any other format just as they are today.

Data verification prevents age-related data corruption as well as hardware and software errors. Applied each time a file is backed up, it ensures the data cannot be corrupted without external influence.

 

[DrEntropy]

Sneddon!!Where th' frell have you been?!?! I just ~KNEW~ this'd draw you out.

As for "archival storage"... It's a pipe-dream. Particularly where "digital" imagery is concern'd.

"Archival" is now a fifty year record "officially". S'Great. As long as ya have th' resources to continually upgrade the medium and retrieval methods.

May the gods have mercy on those without that ability.

'cause without it the amateur records are lost. Family histories, incidental images, evidence...

 

[NutmegCT]

From my humble (19th century) perspective ... the medium isn't going to be the future problem. The future problem will be the medium *reader*.

Sure hope someone's keeping pristine examples of:
78 rpm disc players
8 track players
audio cassette players
punch card readers
paper tape readers
35mm slide projectors
16mm movie projectors
"slide strip" projectors
VHS, Beta, and U-matic tape players
CD players
DVD players
Blu-ray players
etc. etc.

Remember those famous lines about the stone found half-buried in the desert sands ... and it took mucho decades to decipher the "obsolete" language. Rosetta is just one example.

"For I am Ozymandias, King of Kings.
Look on my works, ye mortals, and despair."

T.

 

[coldplugs]

... The future problem will be the medium *reader*....

That is exactly the point I tried to make earlier. I have some interesting stuff recorded on a 1200 foot reel of 1/2 inch tape at 800 bpi. Where could I read it today at a reasonable cost?

I also was recently given a box of 8mm movie film, 1 or 2 of which might contain images of my parents when they were in the twenties. Similar problem, but not as bad. I found a cheap film editor on eBay and will go from there.

Anyway, I suppose those of us who are concerned about long-term digital storage and use can always just print the digital photos and see how long ~they~ last.

On balance I think long term storage is a manageable issue and that digital photography has made picture taking more fun and affordable for most of us.

 

[MikeP]

One thing I do use is read/write cds instead of write once. I read an article a couple years ago about how the technology that allows them to be rewritten is different and should last longer before fade starts introducing errors. so far it seems to be correct.

And I believe it was the Smithsonian I saw that was scavanging old equipment, particularly from the 50s thru the 70s because of all the material they had that required obsolete readers, software, formats, etc. You have to plan for the inevitable changes.

As for JPG images being good for the next 100 years, well perhaps so but I think you have to look at it as if it'll be obsolete. After all, 20 years ago would you have said that the various home tape formats like the VCR and cassette would be obsolete and practically impossible to find??

 

[jsneddon]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:]The future problem will be the medium *reader*.[/QUOTE]

no kidding. 10 years ago the Zip drive was the next best thing to pre-sliced bread.... I just realized the other day that the only digital copy I have of this huge digital restoration I did from a scanned glass-plate negative is on a Zip disk. Dag nab it. The drive is dead. So there is one crappy inkjet 5x7 now - I knew that one day digital printing would get better and cheaper so I printed this one as an interim for the old man - It's a picture of my great-gran'da standing in front of the coal mine he worked at in So. Ill. after he left Scotland.

Just a lesson for people to think about...

fortunately I still have the glass plate but I no longer have access to the level of scanning equipment that I used for free. "Normal" people in their right mind would charge me an arm and a leg to scan this thing.

 

[GregW]

Are you talking about the 100MB Zip drives? A quick google turns up a bunch for sale, some new. Go git 'em!

 

[aerog]

Yeah, iomega stuff is all over the place. I know a few people that still use them, and I'm 99% sure the brand-new 250mb zip-drives are compatible with the 100mb disks.

 

[aerog]

"Normal" people in their right mind would charge me an arm and a leg to scan this thing.

The photolab I use normally only goes up to about 9" negs, but I think he could do an 8x10 if needed. Anyway, he does a 3175dpi B&W scan for $20 (that's about a 1gb file).

 

[jsneddon]

"Normal" people in their right mind would charge me an arm and a leg to scan this thing.

The photolab I use normally only goes up to about 9" negs, but I think he could do an 8x10 if needed. Anyway, he does a 3175dpi B&W scan for $20 (that's about a 1gb file).

oooh. that's not bad. I actually haven't set foot in a photolab since I quit the industry and I forgot that the prices must be dropping as the technology improves.

now that I think about it I was doing HDR with this thing before I knew what to call it. There was a light leak and the bottom half of the plate was fogged so we actually ran 2 scans - one for the normal top half and another to salvage any detail in the bottom half.... then I combined them on my blazing 486 and Photoshop 2 or 3.

 

[Steve_S]

That's exactly what the article was saying. It's the hardware that changes. The data itself is in no danger of being lost. The difference between things like punch cards and 8-tracks, and JPG images, is that reading a JPG image is just a matter of a software plugin, where punch cards and 8-tracks take an entire piece of specialty hardware which cannot be duplicated by anything else in existence. JPGs are simply data which require no special media to store, so they can be transferred from machine to machine. Example... you can load a Mac file onto a PC. The PC has no idea what it is or how to read it, but the file can still be stored and moved around on the PC. It would only take a piece of software to open up the file.

Zip drives? I have a 100MB external Zip that I haven't used in 10 years if anyone is interested. Got a few discs, too..

 

[aerog]

There's probably someone out your way that can do it for a reasonable price. Just about everyone scans their film now and the aerial-photo business is still mostly done with large format cameras (9x9" film). The only problem I can see with a glass plate is newton rings, it's bad enough with film!

Anyway, the consumer-level scanners these days are pretty darned good too - for the price. This is 3.5"x3.5" section of a 9"x9" neg on an Epson 4990 flatbed scanner, the V700 is probably the closest thing out there now. Not exactly cheap, but if you need to be able to do different size negs, slides, and prints, it covers everything well:

...and a tighter 1cm x 1cm area on the same scanner