Digital BW, The Print

Peter,

I fully agree with you. More ... I bet sometime from now there will be a big come back from digital to negatives.
Digital is probably a fantastic media for certain professionals, reporters, architects etc... but for mister Nobody, pictures mean family "souvenir", he won't have any, digital is a big mistake. 
First he will have to transfer the pictures to his computer, in a file well kept and organised in the hard drive, that's already a challenge, I know I teach that every day.
When he manage to find out how to transfer from the camera, he usually erase half of the pictures and do not know where he stores the rest on his computer. 
Along the way he has many chances to screw up a bunch or lost all of them, we all know too well that computers don't behave exactly the way we would like sometimes. A virus, or the well known "somebody else mistake" and everything is gone or get stuck. 
Then he will have to engrave a CD, that's another challenge giving him plenty of time to give up. Sure enough he won't do all these manipulations every time and will live that X-Mega pixel in the drawer. 
Now suppose he reach the point where he has a stack of twenty CD and he wants to find the picture of "Jovial Joe" after twenty beers two years ago during a vacation somewhere ; he will have to search in each of them and it is obvious that when you look for something you never find it. The game of five guys behind a screen trying to see something isn't going to last very long.
If he realise all this quickly he will get back to neg and as usual will give it to the lab, get it back within an hour, stack both negs and prints into a shoe box, no hassle! Any time from there he has just to open the box, crack open a can and enjoy the prints.
I remember some years ago they were all buying Camrecorders, what's happen then, I don't see them anymore....because that tool was too technical it get back into the drawers, digital cameras will have the same fate.
Just to say, a friend of mine bought one digital cam a year ago, he looked at the manual, fiddle with a bit and never snap a picture with it.... too complicated for him. Remember an old ad from Kodak "clik clak thanks Kodak" to persuade people how easy it was to snap, they seem to have forgotten all about it.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Peter Nelson 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 11:26 PM
  Subject: [Digital BW] Re: how many REALLY do store digital copies elsewhere



  --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Christer 
  Rosewelll <christerart@m...> wrote:
  >  you gotta leave something behind for those who's
  > supposed to dissect you and your work when you're
  > not around anymore - if nothing else - this will 
  > make it a lot easier for 'em...=*^)

  WRONGO!

  It will make it a lot HARDER for 'em!

  Digital technology changes so fast that even 15 years from now there 
  will be no easy way to read those DVD's. 

  Assuming that the shelf life of the media itself isn't an issue, in 
  15 or 20 years we'll be - what - maybe 3 generations of storage 
  technology past DVD's.    Traditionally PC's overlap one generation 
  prior to what's current.   When 3.5" floppies came out most PC's also 
  came with 5.25" floppies, too.   When CD's came out they still 
  shipped with 3.5" floppies but 5.25's were gone.  Now that DVD's are 
  standard, 3.5" floppies are going away (NONE of my last 3 computers 
  came with one) but PC's can still read CD's.

  So say XYZ replaces DVD in 5 years - DVD's will still be around.    
  But 5 years later, when ABC replaces XYZ, DVD's will go and computers 
  will still have old XYZ drives.     

  And nevermind the drives - you would also need DRIVERS, and something 
  that can read the file formats, etc!!    How many PC's today have 
  drivers and display software for hardware and image formats that were 
  in use 20 years ago?

  So your plan forces your heirs and descendants to keep copying your 
  images to whatever is current every few years!   That's a lotta 
  trouble for them to go through!   What makes you think they'll be 
  willing to do that?

  Now *I*, on the other hand, have Kodachrome slides and BW negatives 
  my father took over 60 years ago!!    They have been sitting around 
  in attics and drawers all this time and NOBODY had to do ANYTHING to 
  update them.   Yet I can pop them into my Nikon Coolscan and read 
  them like they were taken yesterday.

  If you want archival images for your descendents, you need to pick a 
  storage medium that does not force them to do constant maintenance.   
  I suggest BW silver-emulsion film.   Even if there are no scanners, 
  because no ones uses film, in the future, there will still be 
  cameras.   And those cameras will be FAR higher-res and wider dynamic 
  range than today.   So your descendants can just "scan" the old film 
  by taking a picture of it, like people do today to copy slides with 
  their cameras.




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