Digital BW, The Print

There is absolutely no way that all those thousands of people with all those
millions of dollars at stake will allow today's population of digital images
to be unreadable in the future.  That is not to say that you won't have to
convert them at some point, perhaps either to a new storage medium or to a
different data format.  To do so will be your responsibility.  BUT such a
path will always be available for RAW digital image data.  Think about it,
do you think Adobe or its successor would allow this to happen - no - there
is too much at stake.  If anything the risk is the other way around.
Digital data is very mutable.  You might rather find that in 25 years they
no longer make scanners and you will be digging in the antique shops to find
one so you can play catch up.


> From: Robert Damon <robert.damon@...>
> Reply-To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 18:30:23 -0500
> To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: how many REALLY do store digital copies
> elsewhere
> 
> 
> I'm getting excellent results scanning Kodachrome (and Ektachrome)
> slides taken in the late 70's. So 25 year old Kodachrome slides are
> holding up well in my hands. The slides look good visually and they
> produce nice images via my Nikon 4000 ED scanner. The overwhelming
> majority of them do not appeare to have visually deteriorated at all.
> I'm not confident any of my digital images will be easily readable 25
> years from now. Long term storage of digital data (not just images) is
> a major issue for many of the reasons outlined by Peter Nelson (and
> others). I've got lots (probably hundreds) of 3.5" floppy disks with
> data (documents, etc.) prepared on a Macintosh IIx or IIci back in the
> late 80s-early 90s. I doubt if I could read much of it anymore. The OS
> has changed, software has changed or disappeared, floppy disk drives
> are no longer standard equipment (on Macs, anyway), etc.  Most of them
> will simply be discarded -- not worth the time or trouble anymore to
> even figure out what's on them.
> 
> On the other hand, I have talked to some friends who, during that time
> period (late 70's) bought cheap film (repackaged inexpensive movie
> film, I think it was) thinking they were saving money vs. buying
> Kodachrome. Their images have all but disappeared, and are now useless.
> So not all film will last. Kodachrome is apparently among the best of
> the color films in this regard. Properly processed and stored high
> quality B&W film is probably the best for long term storage.
> 
> Regards,
> Bob Damon