archival properties of slide film

[pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Sobalvarro)]

Personally, I hope to make the images on my current slides last as
long as I or anyone else care about them.  Top-end scanners today can
do about 4500 dpi, which is close to the resolution of fine-grain
film, and can do 16 bits on each of three channels.  If a "Truecolor"
24-bit representation is sufficient, 4500 dpi gives about 90 megabytes
for an uncompressed 35mm slide, which is too pricey for lots of slides
today, but will be quite reasonably cheap in 5 to 10 years.

Now, you may be thinking that digital media don't last forever, but
with appropriate error-correcting technology, they only have to last
until the next generation of storage media come along, when the
information can be transferred with very low probability of loss of
information.