Digital BW, The Print

And guess what old Bill is doing?  Digitising.  Preserving.  Moving data
from an old, highly perishable and difficult to backup format to a new
format.  Yes I am sure there will be specialists who still require
specialist machines.  But don't count on film scanners being as readily
available to the retail market at today's price point in 25 years time.
They exist because there is demand for the very process you guys are posting
against - to take an old format and convert it to a new format. You don't
need a film scanner in the traditional darkroom.

A case in point:  today the UK's largest retail electronics store announced
that it is to stop selling VCRs.  Now a thoughtful person who had a VCR
cassette collection (either of commercial films or, particularly, precious
family footage etc) would likely have thought already about the issue of
replacing/transforming his/her data from the old medium to a newer one
(digitisation) and done so.  If they haven't then they just got a wake up
call.  

Whether you like it or not, film is trending out.  Not tomorrow.  Not the
day after.  But in the not too distant future it is very likely that 35mm
and 645 film (at least) is no longer broadly commercially manufactured.
35mm/645 film scanners will parallel this decline, albeit likely with a lag
as there will always be those who are late to shift there data from one
format to the next.  The wise will want to look at their precious negative
pile and follow Bill's example....


> From: sinwen <sinwen@...>
> Reply-To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 01:17:38 +0100
> To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: how many REALLY do store digital copies
> elsewhere
> 
> 
> Steve,
> 
> How many billions of neg & chrome on earth ? To take your way of thinking, do
> you believe they will stop producing scanners or some other tool to read those
> negs ? Human memory is in neg and just for you to realise that, why do you
> think Bill Gates has invested so much in making the most giant pictures
> storage on earth buying all images banks he could find ?
> Up to now films & scanners are still available and I bet they will for a long
> time still....may be digital will gone by then  :-)
> 
> Cheers
> Michel