How long does film have?

[climbing_vine]

What is the definition of "archival" here anyways? Everyone's throwing around the word, but it appears that everyone thinks it means something different.

Perhaps there are degrees of archival storage. On the upper end, you have silver halide negs being stored in humitity and temperature controlled facilities. In the middle of the scale, you have prints stored in shoeboxes and photo albums. At the low end of the scale, you have photos stored in .pict format on 5.25 floppy disks.

Maybe shoeboxes and photo albums are "practically archival," because they're known to last for 50+ years. If we're comparing shoeboxes to floppy disks, I'll put my money with the shoeboxes.

Maybe a floppy, yes... but that's specious. Nobody uses a floppy now. It was a makeshift technology during the infancy of an industry. I might as well claim that "analog" isn't "archival" based on the fading of salt paper prints. Utterly inane and childish, frankly.

The majority of those "shoeboxes", the large majority, are already lost or unsalvageable, and more are following every hour.

And as someone already said, this idea that there are file formats (namely .pict) that can no longer be read is an utter fiction. Mythology. I'm not even a pro and I have at least three programs on my laptop at the moment that can read a .pict file.

I am at pains to stress that I'm not interested in digital except for the occasional usefulness of immediacy. I've owned dozens of cameras and my standby continues to be a self-serviced FED-2. It doesn't matter. Reality is what it is.

 

[climbing_vine]

And as someone already said, this idea that there are file formats (namely .pict) that can no longer be read is an utter fiction. Mythology. I'm not even a pro and I have at least three programs on my laptop at the moment that can read a .pict file.

Update: at least six. Two of them built-in.

 

[antiquark]

Maybe a floppy, yes... but that's specious. Nobody uses a floppy now. It was a makeshift technology during the infancy of an industry.

In 100 years, people will be saying that about CDROMs and DVDs!

 

[Socke]

I have a hard drive with tons of info. I just wish I could find a SCSI to USB cable.

Try this http://www.usb-ware.com/usb-scsi-adapter-u2scx.htm and an old SCSI external HD enclosure.

 

[FrankS]

Sitemistic, your view of this topic/issue is so different from mine. I've got to think it is due to you photojournalistic background, where today the image has value because it's news, and tomorrow it is worthless old news. Not everyone thinks like that about old images. I think my grandkids will be very interested in seeing images I've made/am making, just as I value the old photos of my grandparents and great grandparents and their lives.

 

[Bob Michaels]

Maybe a floppy, yes... but that's specious. Nobody uses a floppy now. It was a makeshift technology during the infancy of an industry.

You know I think punched paper tape and punch cards (both round and square holes) were some 30 years after this electronic computing thing got started. The floppy disk is sort of a modern invention.

And how quickly will it come that people will talk about how they used to store data on rotating hard disks read by heads. They'll say that as they plug in their 5 T-byte memory cards or something large, fast and cheap.

The point is that technology will move so fast that we'll always be hard pressed to retrieve data stored on mediums that quickly become obsolete. I remember that data I archived to 5 1/4" floppies.

 

[FrankS]

Originally Posted by climbing_vine
Maybe a floppy, yes... but that's specious. Nobody uses a floppy now. It was a makeshift technology during the infancy of an industry.

Crystal ball gazing: The computer industry is still in its infancy and the changes still to come will make past developments all look makeshift.

 

[rich815]

Film will be pretty much gone in the next 3-5 years. Know how I know? I read it on the internet.....about 4 years ago.

So...anytime now....

 

[FrankS]

I'm thinking that one of the qualities of film is that film images are somehow more worthy. Digital is just so easy, there is little value imbued onto the images, other than newsy stuff, they are quite easily disposable. If you have to work or wait for something, it has a greater perceived value.

 

[FrankS]

I'm thinking that one of the qualities of film is that film images are somehow more worthy. Digital is just so easy, there is little value imbued onto the images, other than newsy stuff, they are quite easily disposable. If you have to work or wait for something, it has a greater perceived value.

It's sort of like painting vs photography. A painitng is more difficult to produce, takes longer, and often has a greater perceived vlaue than a mere photo.

 

[FrankS]

That's a double negative, right?

Certainly the market is different, but there are still new film (RF even) cameras being developed and produced.

Niche market for sure, but still surviving and thriving. Film will be the same IMO.

 

[FrankS]

If it's not easier, why are so many people buying digicams instead of film cams?

One reason that it is easer, is photoshop type software. Fix your mistakes after the fact.

 

[FrankS]

Actually, I should bow out of this discussion at this point. My pro-film and anti-digital bias is showing, and I freely admit to that. Just the way I am. Film does it for me, digital doesn't. Fortunately I'm not in the photo business where I am forced to use digital or go under.

 

[Kin Lau]

I'm thinking that one of the qualities of film is that film images are somehow more worthy. Digital is just so easy, there is little value imbued onto the images, other than newsy stuff, they are quite easily disposable. If you have to work or wait for something, it has a greater perceived value.

Funny but wedding shooters who shoot film claim film is _easier_. Drop it off at the lab, pick up the prints later. No effort required for colour correction etc.

Many film users I know could care less about film itself. They kept the prints (maybe) and dumped the negs.

Digicam users today are the same people who used a P&S and a 1hr lab.

 

[FrankS]

Actually, so many people are buying digital p&s cameras (which are the majority of digital cameras sold) because they don't have to get all those photos printed anymore. The few they actually print get spit out on $30 inkjet printers at home. Compare this to film p&s where everything was printed.

Trying to "fix" stuff in photoshop just makes a lot of work. That's why I get it right in the camera.

No doubt you do get it right in the camera, sitemistic, no doubt or slight on your ability at all. This may be due to your previous film training.

I just think, too many family images are never printed and are lost due to the nature of the digital file, comapred to a physical negative. I think a generation will have lost a large portion of their childhood photographs due to digital (and their carelessness and lack of understanding about file backup.)

 

[colyn]

I retired a year ago but recently went to work part time for a local commercial photo finishing company. We print, mount, etc for working photographers across the country.

While the bulk of our printing involves printing from digital images we do see a lot of film work coming through and it has increased since I started working there.

As I see it film still has a long life ahead..

A personal observation: Most of the digital images we get from so called professional photographers is nothing but crap. Out of focus, poorly composed, terrible color rendering, etc while the film images are well done and of professional quality..

 

[climbing_vine]

You know I think punched paper tape and punch cards (both round and square holes) were some 30 years after this electronic computing thing got started. The floppy disk is sort of a modern invention.

Not in context. You are talking about industrial computing in the pre-microcomputer era, not consumer computing. The two are exceedingly different things. The topic of discussion here is the era of pervasive high-level digital technology in the consumer sphere, and in that context floppies are decidedly ancient--an artifact of the infancy of that market.

Why did 35mm film become a standard? It happened to be the medium of choice in the leading cameras in the consumer marketplace as the consumer marketplace for cameras became an everyman proposition. Everything that came before that was more laborious due partially to smaller "volume" (ie, fewer frames per roll or no rolls at all). Similarly, floppy diskettes mostly predate the mainline consumer arrival of the computer (I grew up solidly middle-class in the 1980s and knew exactly three people with a computer until the mid-90s--I am not anomolous). They also (for all practical purposes) predate digital photography. Talking about them in our context is the very definition of a strawman.

And how quickly will it come that people will talk about how they used to store data on rotating hard disks read by heads. They'll say that as they plug in their 5 T-byte memory cards or something large, fast and cheap.

And actual human beings will continue to transfer the files that they actually care about to new computers or other devices as they are purchased--or print them. It's facile to suggest that there will be a day when we all wake up and are suddenly screwed because nothing will read a DVD anymore. The people who are bitten by that will be exactly the same ones who already come around one day to discover that their mystical box of photos in a box in the attic is rotted beyond use.

In other words, plus ca change. Big deal.

[QUOTE}The point is that technology will move so fast that we'll always be hard pressed to retrieve data stored on mediums that quickly become obsolete. I remember that data I archived to 5 1/4" floppies.[/QUOTE]

I utterly and completely reject this. It's simply untrue and silly, I'm sorry. In the past decade not a single common digital storage medium has been lost to the sands of time. The last one that was, was really the 5.25 floppy--and even those, honestly, are easy to find a reader for if you really care. The use of it as an example in these discussions is, again, silly and facile, and not something anyone should be proud of harping on. If you really and truly want to get a file off an old floppy and can't manage to do it with a few hours of effort, then you're doing something wrong..... or just didn't want it as much as you thought you did, which is (again) the real crux of this discussion in the real world.

 

[climbing_vine]

Originally Posted by climbing_vine
Maybe a floppy, yes... but that's specious. Nobody uses a floppy now. It was a makeshift technology during the infancy of an industry.

Crystal ball gazing: The computer industry is still in its infancy and the changes still to come will make past developments all look makeshift.

Not in the sense in which I used the word, Frank.

Future tech will make the stuff of the past look antiquated. Almost a tautology.

HOWEVER, and this is the point: personal computer technology has now had ten solid years in the mass market. It has a "maturity" via inertia that it did not have previously. Comparing the pre-1995 (or so) era to what has happened since just doesn't work. It just doesn't. As I said, it's like comparing the markets and issues of pre-silver halide, and particularly pre-35mm, film days to post. One has, in terms of markets and hence what materials and resources are commonly available, little to nothing to do with the other.

 

[Socke]

Sentimental value won't help because shareholders usualy don't invest in it.

But sentimental value helps to prolong an archives livespan, we tend to preserve what we care about.

Some 25 years ago it was hard to copy a floppy for me. I had only one floppy drive and copying meant reading portions to RAM, changing the floppy, writing from RAM to the new floppy, changing back and reading the next portion ..... until everyting was copied. It was tedious and stupefying, but I did it.
If my memory serves me, a single sided 8" floppy had 72 Kbytes and it took 10 swaps to copy it.
In 1990 my job included setting up some used HP 3000 for new subsidiaries, the machine we used here had a reel to reel tape drive and the "newer" ones had QIC tapes, so I had to copy data from one medium to another, in 1991 the machine in the headquarter was exchanged against a, then, brand new HP 3000/937 which had DAT drive. So I had to copy all the old tapes with financial information from the past 10 years onto DAT.
Later came MO drives, then with some 650MB storage, which where replaced with CD-Rs two years ago.
1990 it took me two hours to copy 60MB from reel to reel tape to QUIC tape, from the same reel to reel tapes to DAT was a little faster since the DAT held the amount of 20 reel to reel tapes and I saved some time rewinding.
Copying the MOs to CD-Rs took roughly half an hour per medium, but that was fully automated then.
We didn't loose anything because we care! And with every step the copying process needed less attention and got faster. I can copy a DVD in some 20 minutes with a very cheap two drive setup whereas it took me weeks to copy this amount of data on 8" floppies on a single drive setup I could barely afford.
Do I still have the data I stored on magnetic cards with my HP 41 calculator? No. Do I still have the data I stored on micro cassettes with my Sharp 1260 calculator? No. Do I care? No! Thats why I don't have it anymore.

But I still have my fathers first computer drawings made on a Amstrad PC with GEM Artline back in 1987, I do care about those. The original 3.5" disks are long gone as is the software, but the files are intact and usable with modern software.

 

[Socke]

Film will be pretty much gone in the next 3-5 years. Know how I know? I read it on the internet.....about 4 years ago.

So...anytime now....

Some 3 years ago I could buy Kodak Gold at any gas station here, it's gone now. Every supermarket hat at least two brands, usually Agfa and Kodak and some had Ilford B/W and I could drop of my films to get them developed at the supermarket. Not so today. One brand, one type in one sensitivity. ISO 200 Fuji C200 is the only one I've seen in smaller supermarkets this year.
Even photo chains are clearing their shelfs from film to make room for digital products.

So your prediction isn't too far from reality, three years ago I wouldn't have thought that one day I'll stock up on film because I might not find some when I needed it. I never had more than the two or three rolls I intended to shoot.