On Mon, April 28, 2008 09:46, Mark Blackwell wrote: > 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. Yep, digital archives require management. I absolutely agree. > 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. And again, I agree; our information on stability of negatives and prints is more accurate than our information on the stability of hard drives and optical disks, because it's based on longer real-world experience. > > 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. But there's only one negative, and if you lose it, you're sunk. Jaques Lowe's heirs had that experience (he'd actually died a few months earlier). With digital, copies are equivalent to originals, the distinction no longer matters; so I can have master copies of my imges *both* at home *and* at my mother's house, say. A house fire at one of them won't cost me my images. But the images I have only on film are only in one place, and if my house burned I'd lose them (except the ones I've scanned). > 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. Film I've shot in my life has faded significantly. Scratches are building up on some of the older B&W negs, too, just from sliding them in and out of sleeves (which are meant to protect the film; but I digress). I don't know what you mean "reasonable storage conditions". But is anybody here keeping their film negs at freezing and in controlled humidity? If not, it'd degrading as we argue. (In fact it still is, but it's darned slow at that temperature). -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
