Matthew
Established
Socke said:
Color neg film has the worst longevity. Stored properly, color slides and B&W negs have considerably longer lifespan. Archivality is obviously a serious problem with all photographic media--analog or digital. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if in 30 years time (ignoring my dire predications in pervious posts and we're all chugging along happily as we do today) that media from today which hasn't be be updated to the latest standard will be unreadable. At least a faded photographic print or neg has something to it. What does an unreadable file have?
This is really so far off Tom Abrahamsson's review of the M8--which I am very very excited about (the camera itself more than Tom's review), lest you all think I'm a crazed luddite. Shall we move on?
S
Socke
Guest
Matthew, I wouldn`t bet on 30 years, but the CDs I burnt in 1994 are still readable in my dual layer DVD burner and the next generation of optical media drives will be compatible to those. I haven`t seen a blue ray or HD-DVD player yet, but compatibility to CDs and DVDs is built into these devices, so no problem for the next five years.
I know that Addox B&W negatives from the 1950s are still perfect, I have a couple 100 of those, but if the HP5 I shoot today lasts 50 years has yet to be seen, ask me again in 2050
Hm, no, my fathers negs weren`t developed in some new fangled speed enhancing developer like AM74 and not fixed in Tetenal superfix, I doubt my negs will last more than 30 years.
I know that Addox B&W negatives from the 1950s are still perfect, I have a couple 100 of those, but if the HP5 I shoot today lasts 50 years has yet to be seen, ask me again in 2050
Hm, no, my fathers negs weren`t developed in some new fangled speed enhancing developer like AM74 and not fixed in Tetenal superfix, I doubt my negs will last more than 30 years.
Matthew
Established
Socke,
I'm going to hold you to that. I want to see those HP5 negs in 2050. I'll come to Bremen.
I'm going to hold you to that. I want to see those HP5 negs in 2050. I'll come to Bremen.
EllitoGuy
Member
honestly, these concerns about unreadable formats in the future are harebrained at best in my opinion. its not as though the future will come suddenly, and so software created to read/convert digital filetypes will always support previous systems. especially because storage capacity increases at a much faster rate than program sizes...Matthew said:
lets say very conservatively that for a program like nikon capture or canon equiv to support older filetypes theyll need an extra cd or two worth of programming (this is extremely conservative), our storage capacity will soon make that an insignificant amount of data... lets face it, the gigabyte in 2005 is what the megabyte was a decade ago, and shortly the terabyte will be what the giga is now...
plus, its in canon's best interest economically that we can access old files, so that we can use their line of printers to print em, making canon more $$
anyhow, we can move on...
R
rpsawin
Guest
EllitoGuy said:
Sure, as long as you don't count the cost of the computer, monitor and whatever back up device you use film is extremely costly in comparison.
Bob
EllitoGuy
Member
rpsawin said:
i dont, because i dont own a computer solely to manipulate and store my images...
it does a lot of other neat things too, and i owned a computer for a long time before i had any interest in photography.
ywenz
Veteran
So is Tom only in the business of selling soft release buttons now that the M8 is out?
Trius
Waiting on Maitani
Olsen said:
Perhaps exciting in some respects, but b&w still moves my soul. Thus a digital b&w workflow that can truly "match" film is important. But I will have to see it to believe it.
S
Socke
Guest
rpsawin said:
Asus board from Ebay 25 Euro, Intel Celeron 1400 CPU from Ebay 60 Euro, big tower case salvaged from a defect computer in the office, silent powersupply 60 Euro, two 4 port S-ATA cards from a store nearby 35 Euro, LG dual layer DVD burner 60 Euro, 2 256MB SDRAM modules 75 Euro, ATI VGA card salvaged, 2 120GB drives 210 Euro and 2 240 GB drives 190 Euro.
RAM, powersupply and drives were new when bought, everything else was two to six years old. I could have used the old powersupply but I wanted a very silent one powerfull enough to feed eight harddisks and a DVD-RAM. Since I use it for storing all of my data I bought new drives 120 drives two years ago and new 240 drives this year, don't know what is current in 2008.
It doesn't need a monitor since it is hooked up to my TV and I have a TV card in it so it works as an harddiskrecorder, too.
So, let's look at it this way, Internetrouter, mailserver, fileserver, homeentertainment for a total of 715 Euro spent over two years and if it weren't for my videos I'd have saved the 190 Euro for the new drives this year.
A roll of slide film including processing costs somewhere between 5 and 15 Euros here, you wouldn't want to duplicate Velvia 50 on Senia 100 and Kodachrome 64 on Elitechrome 100, would you?
So for my use I come to an average of 8 Euro per roll, since I allways have two copies on DVD thats 16 Euro per set of duplicates.
1 roll of slides a week in a year is more expensive than my storage setup and there is enough money left to pay for the DVDs.
I scan with a Canon FS2710 scanner hooked up to a 2001 Fujitsu Siemens PC with 512MB RAM and a 1400MHz Athlon CPU, the scaner was made when a 233MHz Pentium II with 128 MB RAM and a 10GByte harddisk was considered a very fast mashine, so my vintage setup is certainly fast enough to scan my slides and I got the computer for free, I bought the Acer 17" TFT for 200 Euro in march to replace another 17" TFT from 2001 which shows some signs of use now.
I have all the programs and the operating system in sourcecode, in the more than unlikely case that nobody makes Linux distributions anymore, I just port the source to whatever mashine is available in 10 years.
There is just one small fault in my reasoning, I scan with 2720dpi on a very old scanner so I don't get the best out of my slides but good enough fior my needs. If you need more than that and you have to buy a drum scanner or an Imacon, slides may be cheaper.
S
Socke
Guest
Trius said:
I don't think thats possible, I'd miss the developing at least
Tim Gray
Well-known
Socke said:
I've certainly lost data that was foolishly stored on 1 CD... I've also lost info that was on floppies and on hard drives, as I'm sure we all have. The nice thing about digital is obviously that you can make as many copies as you like and store them nilly-willy all over the place. The fact of the matter is that it takes a bit of follow through to actually make multiple copies and store them in different locations.
If most people did the digital equivalent of throwing their pictures in a shoe box in the closet, I don't think those images would survive 10 or 15 years. I know I burn my digital photos to 2 dvds (stored in separate locations) and have them stored on 2 hard drives, but do most casual photographers do that?
EllitoGuy
Member
well they start to once they lose their stuff heheTim Gray said:
R
rpsawin
Guest
Socke said:
So you agree that there is a cost associated with digital storage.
Bob
S
Socke
Guest
rpsawin said:
Sure, cheaper than duplicating slides or negs, but there are cost which rise with your expectations.
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jaapv
RFF Sponsoring Member.
Socke said:I don't think thats possible, I'd miss the developing at least
Three spray bottles, Volker, spray on your monitor during your workflow: developer at RAW conversion, stop-bath during PS and fixer for saving!
S
Socke
Guest
jaapv said:Three spray bottles, Volker, spray on your monitor during your workflow: developer at RAW conversion, stop-bath during PS and fixer for saving!
And I can use my lensbrush to clean my monitor, sounds convincing.
N
NoTx
Guest
Socke said:
Um... CD's are a huge crapshoot in longevity. Many will fail in a year, others in 5, 10 or maybe 20. BUt you often just don't know. Has to do with oxidation.
wagman
Newbie
The Canon Pro 9500 13 x 19 with 10 Lucia inks coming in January might the printer of black and white to look at. Under $1000.
pfogle
Well-known
I wouldn't touch CDs - I thought about it, and even burned a hundred or so before I realised how nutty it is - suppose (as seems to be the case) that even with the best available CDs, two or three percent fail in the first five years - how the heck can you tell which are dud? You'd have to play them all to check them. And if you decide to dupe them, you have to play them all as well. HopelessNoTx said:
So now I use multiple hard drives - dead easy to run disk check once in a while, and just ditch any drive that shows errors. I keep at least two identical drives, so I can just make a new copy, and making another backup copy is automatic - drag and drop or use RAID.
If you check them once every few years (the archive ones, that is, which are not online) you will automatically keep the format up to date, so hardware obsolescence isn't a problem either. And if it looks as though computers are going out of fashion, well, you could then have them all printed to film
M
Magnus
Guest
CD storage is crap ... I agree with that.
I store all my digital and scanned negative on harddiks, and at appr. 100$ for 250Gb this is quite an ok solution
I store all my digital and scanned negative on harddiks, and at appr. 100$ for 250Gb this is quite an ok solution