Digital Obsolescence vs. Film Obsolescence

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MRohlfing said:
Anyone archiving fotos as DNG?

As I take pictures in RAW format, I feel the need of archiving some kind of RAW. The concept of DNG as an open format looks promising.

The color of a DNG might fade slower than the color of other proprietary RAW formats 😀
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Yes - but my M9 delivers DNGs.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Quite apart from that, the quality will always be miserable: screen-sized, a few hundred pixels on a side.
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Pixel pitch has steadily decreased over time, and monitor size has steadily increased. With this increased display resolution, the median image size and resolution has increased as well. Meanwhile mass storage has fallen inprice at a rate considerably faster than transistor count (i.e., Moore's Law).

Perhaps the resolution is not where you or I would like it to be, but that's a far cry from saying that the quality will "always be miserable." Extrapolation from past experience indicates that that simply isn't so.
 
Roger Hicks said:
...I still don't believe that it will ever lead to the survival of the same percentage of pictures
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Percentage of total pictures, sure. But the absolute number of pictures preserved will likely increase.

The number of pictures archived per person per year is harder to guess at and that's an interesting question.
 
semilog said:
Percentage of total pictures, sure. But the absolute number of pictures preserved will likely increase.

The number of pictures archived per person per year is harder to guess at and that's an interesting question.
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When I deliver a job, it's typically a CD or DVD containing “adjusted” JPG (& PSD) files made from the original Raw. In a few cases, where the client has an in-house graphics department, I include the original, un-adjusted Raw files with the JPGs. In some cases, I burn 2 copies of the optical final. I always archive my work to optical.

Now, I would think, the first thing to happen with the delivered optical, is once it’s examined for it’s contents, the files would be moved to the client’s HDD. I honestly don’t know what happens in many cases. What I do know is that every year, one or two of my clients will call in a panic, needing a copy of a previous job ASAP. They've lost the delivered disks. This happened about 2 weeks ago. The Publications Director for the organization in this case, loaned the copies to others in the group, (over 100 people on site) and the work disappeared. This particular job was almost a year old. I have copies and store them on DVDs. As often as I see this happen, I wonder how many photos will disappear, not due to any flaw in the storage media, but because of human nonsense. This kind of thing could happen with any media.

Some lost photos are found, in time. If you’re interested in a great example: Go to http://www.fraenkelgallery.com/ under the Artists tab look at the work of E. J. Bellocq. His work was lost and then found ( by Lee Friedlander). There is also a listing for “Photographer Unknown”.

p.
 
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Well if digital storage is so secure why do bonding (insurance) companies require any movie that is being produced on a digital cinema camera be archived as a film out on 35mm film stock =)

Unfortunatly its not really about formats, its about physical archiving, a neg in a sleeve will only deteriorate in colors and still be somewhat viewable after 50 years of being in a shoebox. The best digital archival solution at the moment in LTO-4 and is rated at 25 years in a climate controlled 0 humidity environment before it need to be replicated or risk total data loss.

Hard drives if not used constantly will be dead due to stickton within a year or two.
CD's and DVD's have a rated life of 10 years without decay in a 0 light environment.

Unfortunatly at the moment from a purely archival standpoint film is safer, not nessesaroly better, but safer.
 
It's a good thing that I use my 1GByte hard drive 5 days a week, ever since 1993. Still works. I use it to back up my development work from 2GByte hard drive. They are more stable than a 1TByte drive that you could by today, and have outlasted my 40, 80, 160, 500Gbyte drives.

And the 80MByte SCSI drive in the DCS200 still works, but I only fire it up every so often. One time I left a roll of film in a camera for 10 years before getting it processed. The images on the 80MByte drive did better.

And now, this is a Digital vs Film Debate. Which will survive longer- isn;t there a cave that microsoft keeps, way underground, where cosmic rays can't penetrate to deteriorate stuff??
 
Brian Sweeney said:
And now, this is a Digital vs Film Debate. Which will survive longer- isn;t there a cave that microsoft keeps, way underground, where cosmic rays can't penetrate to deteriorate stuff??
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Not Microsoft but yes there is a limestone cave in the US that is a long term archival vault.
 
No don't get me wrong I would never want to foist my own views on anyone else, I am a compulsive photo taker, my Library (Film+Digi) is well over a quarter of a million frames, most the world will never see.

I don't know i think because of my interest in history I feel I would have loved to see more photos survive from the past so seek to make mine survive as long as possible.
 
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