RE: [Leica] Archival storage

[chucko@siteconnect.com (Chuck Albertson)]

I've heard much the same opinion from someone who is consulting on a project
to organize the government's numerous electronic documents for the National
Archives. Magnetic media are much more archival than CDs and the like. I was
surprised.

But I'll stick with film. I couldn't help noticing, in all the hoopla
leading up to Mark McGwire's home run record (big event in American
baseball, for overseas subscribers), the best images of Roger Maris' run for
the record in 1961 were on film. All the kinescopes and other electronic
media from that era looked horrible, like it was photographed on a cheap
convenience-store surveillance camera, through a Coke-bottle lens. Granted,
the video technology of today is many magnitudes better than that, but I
have yet to be convinced it will be viewable for long.

Chuck Albertson
Seattle, Wash.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> [mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us]On Behalf Of Bill Bain
> Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 1998 6:32 AM
> To: leica-users-digest@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: [Leica] Archival storage
>
>
>
> Althoough widely used as such, optical is most decidedly not archival.
> I beleive that ISO estimates that the shelf live of the media may be
> 10-20 years, but the biggest problem is not deterioration of the media,
> but rather that the data on the media may be in an obsolete format that
> the then-current machines cannot read.  This has happened once with
> optical disk drives already, fand or other electronic media as well: how
> many places can read information that is stored on an 8" floppy disk
> now?
>
> Archival prints are probably still the only true long-term storage.
>
> Bill Bain
>