Digital BW, The Print

Steve Kale writes:

> Now this is really stupid....First of all the consumer marketplace disagrees
> and has already switched to digital.

Consumers haven't even the slightest notion of what digital requires in
terms of archiving.  They will find out the hard way.  They are about
the last place I'd look for guidance in photography.

> As for backup, let's not go around that bush again. There will be many
> who wish their parents had kept their negatives at all, or hadn't kept
> their negatives in a shoebox and decided to toss them years ago, or
> wish their parents could afford a camera.

My parents actually have negatives of photos of me, from infancy
onwards.  And when I scan them today, they look a hundred times better
than they did when they got drugstore prints of those negatives decades
ago.  One of the advantages of film was that it stored a huge amount of
information, even before there was an economical way to extract it.  I
scanned some 40-year-old Tri-X negatives (from a shoebox!) not long ago,
and they looked like they had been shot yesterday.