What will happen when the digital imaging wave dies

You can argue the "advantages" of negatives all you like. But in the end, all there will be is digital. We have to come to grips with that or abandon photography.
 
> But huge quantities will survive, enough so future generations will have a pretty good
> idea of what was happening at the beginning of the digital age.

I have a good idea of it. I used to collect old computer manuals. I have one from 1946, for the IBM Mark I. Signed by Grace Hopper. She was surprised to see me with it. She wrote it.

and my 20 year old CD's are starting to delaminate.
 
...and my 40 and 50 year old vinyl LP's still look and sound pretty good! The Kodachromes that my dad shot before and during WW-II look great also. I have some framed 11x14 B&W prints on the wall of square rigger wooden whaling ships dated and signed 1906 and 1918 by A.F. Packard. He was an elderly retired newspaper photographer when I purchased them in the early seventies.
 
Al, your points about digital storage are well taken. It is an issue the industry hasn't successfully addressed.

On the other hand, long-term digital storage represents a marketing opportunity that someone will eventually step into. As for standards, we will either see cooperative standards or de facto standards that are established by the market. (The internet is an example of the former and Microsoft is an example of the latter.) Yes, as new tech hits the streets, we typically go through a sometimes lengthy period in which every vendor goes its own way. Eventually, most vendors fall by the wayside and the remaining successful few realize that their profits are served by playing nice. In the founding days of the personal computer, 25 years ago, we saw an abundance of vendor-specific protocols. Most of those vendors have vanished along with their protocols.

In the fallout, some people will lose, just as some people lost 25 years ago. If you stored precious data on 8-inch floppies formatted in a vendor-specific fashion 25 years ago, you've got a problem if that vendor vanished 20 years ago. But, if you transferred those files to the hard drive in a PC or a Mac or a generic Unix machine, and have kept your storage hardware updated and upgraded, you should be in good shape today.

Here's a telling example of current trends: A relative came across a forgotten box containing a few thousand slides, mostly Kodachromes, from 30 and 40 years ago, in their trays. The first and so far only thought is to pay someone to digitize the slides. No one is considering the quicker and considerably cheaper route of buying a used projector.
 
c.poulton said:
I believe that in the near future the still image will be dead and moving content will be king. This is already begun with both Canon and Nikon introducing video capabilities into their still camera ranges.

Of course the still image will still be there, what I mean is that the method of capturing the still image will change - instead of capturing one still image at a time, we will 'grab' the image off HD video.

Will this change the 'nature' of the still image? Yes I believe that it will. Not sure how exactly but shooting a video stream is completely different from shooting a still.

Film and still digital shooting will still be around for a very long time, just as people still paint and draw, but for the masses the whole concept of a 'still' camera will disappear.

It will be interesting to see if the Leica M10 has HD video capability when it is released in a few years time?
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1080P is only 1MP per frame. And current frame rates don't assure you crisp in focus images due to motion blur. Do you how much compute power, data throughput, storage space you will need to replace still photography with video? 10MP images @ 500FPS ...all in the a package size of current dslrs? I think still photography will be around for a long time, forever.

John
 
jfretless said:
Do you how much compute power, data throughput, storage space you will need to replace still photography with video?
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It is not a technical issue, if it were useful, ways to make it possible would evolve - and probably would already have evolved.

However, motion has per definition a time dimension, which affects both production and consumption cost. Even if we disregard production (assuming that the extra ads placed in the flashy new video newspaper would cover extra production cost), video newspapers can't be viewed at work, would need headphones in public locations like trains and buses, and require the reader to view every picture for longer than he'll usually spend on a entire page, all of which would conflict with the "high information density consumable in public" USP of newspapers in relation to TV.

Sevo
 
Newspapers have been using frame grabs from video for their still photos for years. The Dallas Morning News pioneered it years ago. The results are better than the theory. 🙂

You get video for the web and stills for the print product.
 
This thread always makes me smile when I see it....do you realise that in four or five positions above it 9at this particular moment) there is a thread headed "What will we do when they stop making film." Maybe they will do both we will all go back to drawing pictures!
 
peterm1 said:
This thread always makes me smile when I see it....do you realise that in four or five positions above it 9at this particular moment) there is a thread headed "What will we do when they stop making film." Maybe they will do both we will all go back to drawing pictures!
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Ahh ... but mankind always seems to need polar opposites.

Why do you thing some of us believe in heaven and hell? 😛
 
wgerrard said:
Pretty snazzy. I once had a chance to interview Hopper. That fell through, but I did get to speak with her briefly.
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The Naval Research Lab held the first computer conference in the late 1940's. The Proceedings of it are still in our Library. I always check to see which books are being surplussed. I also got the Programmers Manual for the EDSAC. I paid my way through college by rewriting FORTRAN code to work on First generation Vector Supercomputers. The cost was $1000 per CPU hour on the machine. So when I made code run 140x faster on the parallel hardware, my $7.50/hr salary was cheap.

It was, without a doubt, the best assembly language on any computer ever made. Nina always got mad at me when I told her that the CRAY was boring. It broke everything into 64-element vectors. The ASC could do a three-dimensional array with stride count on two of them. Basically, process all of memory with one instruction. It was great at doing Image Processing. Pre-fetch 25 clock cycles before requiring the data. These days, I do most of my work using RISC assembly language. It's a living and beats being a Manager.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_Advanced_Scientific_Computer

I found some slides from our Digital Imager from 1981. 32 sensing elements, 512 points per scan, stored on 7-track tape. We used a DICOMED to write them to Ektachrome.
 
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