>Actually, inkjet color prints may outlast silver-gelatine B&W prints. >They certainly outlast chromogenic color prints. They may well >outlast dye-transfer prints. That's what they said about the prints from my Epson 1200! It's fruitless to argue on this - the manufacturers blurb tell us the prints will last until "the big crunch": people who've hung the damned things on thier wall behing glass say it can be as little as six months. Happenstance data for silver prints 80+ years old given no special "archival" treatment has proved them to survive (proof not prediction). My own chromogenic prints stored in a box in a drawer have survived 30+y ... >>Unlikely, if you save in a sensible format. >>TIFF has been around for 20 years already, >>it'll be around far more than another 20. 1) TIFF is an extensible format - not a tablet of stone ??? 2) TIFF is a data format: it saves the sequence of bytes (RGB values) and a load of other stuff (color space, profile, etc). These bytes don't actually become an image until they are translated. If the hardware changes, if the media change, so does "the image". I guess what I'm thinking around is to challenge the idea of absolute "constancy" of an image (visual thing) coded within a digital file. Sure, even if we are careful and the sequence of bits on the storage medium is preserved AND we keep refreshing the storage so we don't end up with incompatible/corrupt media there is still another level to the equivalence that lies outside (is not inherent in) the bit stream. Bob
