Mark Blackwell writes : Agreed Lea, but a perfectly working disk with a perfectly working drive might still have to be transfered to another medium at some point to keep the information usable. Even now the image formats likely will change and there could easily come a time with TIFF and JPG become obsolete and would require conversion. http://www.dmcphoto.com/Articles/RAW1/index.html "Did you know your RAW format digital image files may be unreadable ten years from now? Because they are not constructed according to any standard..." "..all I had to do in order to keep my film files in perfect condition for more than twenty years was to keep the film dry and dark at reasonable temperatures. I am again finding it hard to remember what was wrong with film. Since its inception, permanence has been an integral part of photography. Sadly, our prints could have more (potential) permanence than our "negatives" in the digital age." "With these problems related to RAW files, you may be wondering why more photographers don't use JPEG files instead. .. RAW files always give photographers the best chance to produce the best images. Under some circumstances the JPEG files produced by cameras can be almost as good, but only if the exposure and white balance are set perfectly at the moment the photograph is taken" (kinda like when we shot film really ;) http://www.updig.org/guidelines/archiving.php "Archiving RAW image files from Digital SLR cameras is likely be a key challenge in the long-term maintenance of a digital archive. Because each camera model creates a unique file type, the likelihood of files becoming unreadable at some time in the future is high" By converting images to TIFF format, the photographer is storing the images in the most accessible file format. ..you probably eliminate the need to reconvert the files again for many years, perhaps even for your lifetime. There is a downside, however. TIFF files are much larger than RAW files. Converting image files to 16-bit TIFFs can make the files up to 10 times larger than RAW files and 15 times larger than compressed DNG. This will clearly increase the cost of file storage .. Although TIFF files have several compression options (LZW, ZIP, and JPEG), none of them are recommended due to the lack of universal support for a compressed TIFF format. : Most of the storage estimates we have today are just estimates. Total SWAGs or educated guesses and that is the best we can do because the medium hasn't been around that long. We know for the most part how long negatives work and we still have some that are still printable made with crude material by todays standards. : : Now to the issue of duplication, yes a digital file can be duplicated perfectly, but I would think of that as the print not the negative. That negative can also be used to duplicate as many images as you want. : : For the managed archive, digital does have some huge advantages, but they are not as pronounced as one might seem. The biggest one may be to have the images available at your fingertips. By the time you figure in the cost to convert the files and images a few times in its lifetime the cost of digital starts to add up. With film reasonable storage conditions and its pretty much worry free. posted again (25/12/2007):re cine films <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/business/media/23steal.html?> (these guys have been studying case examples so I really don't think they're pulling numbers from thin air) "To store a conventional film master cots $1,059 a year. To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year. Much worse, to a picture that is "born digital" - that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film - pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault. ..One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save ..All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. *But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence* " digital offers a great level of convenience - well, small format does.. and it certainly makes access easier. however I can't see too many people wanting to download a multigigabyte tif produced by me scanning my latest 8x10 - it all of a sudden becomes horribly inconvenient! :) of course I can make a small 800x600 'image' - much more convenient, but it's not the same. I can use an old box and a good lens for making the images and I don't need to be tethered to a computer grunty enough to actually manipulate them, with software powerful enough to actually do anything with such a huge image, nor do I need a pile of hard drives to store these things (with notes on the calendar, when to check and recopy the files) all I need to do is tuck the thin sheet of film away safely and forget it.. for larger formats, working with the image purely on film really does look a whole lot more convenient :) but back to the current trend in convenient small format.. k
