Re: Digital storage???

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

At 11:48 AM 11/27/97 CST, you wrote:
>
>LUGs,
>
>For a while several LUGs have been talking about digital backs, switch to
>digital by photojournalists, etc.  Question?  How will all this stuff be
>stored and managed???  Seems that it will become an overwhelming job
>fairly soon.
>
>
>Richard Hemingway

Here in Silicon Valley, numerous storage manufacturers (Conners, Segate,
etc.) are nearly ready to introduce TeraByte disk drives. And within
another couple of years, terabyte drives will be small enough to fit in
notebook computers. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes (10 to the 12th power
bytes. A trillion bytes). Within five years, storage methods, whether on
media, silicon, or organic in nature, will surpass anything you can
presently fathom. As digital technology progresses, receptors become higher
in resolution and faster, lossless compression and massive storage will
progress as well. The need for something fuels the fire to develop it.

By the time photographers, other than today's catalog photographers, have
high resolution fast digital cameras for photojournalism and the like,
storage will be there to greet them. Storage is actually beginning to
outpace digital capture.

There is still one flaw. To produce a very high resolution digital image
(400+ megabytes) takes time just to move that amount of data. So until the
computer industry starts producing massively parallel processors and bus'
at a reasonable (cheap) cost (they are already used in things like phased
array radar, astrodynamics, etc.) we are stuck. Current high bandwidth
technology is massively expensive. There are a lot of fronts to pursue, and
until *all* of them come together in the future, real film is still the
answer for real photographers.

There were a lot of dooms day-ers predicting the demise of film. No way.
The amount of information that can be captured on a piece of film in a
thousandth of a second, will choke an ordinary computer (unless your name
is George Lucas). Even an $80,000, 8000+ dpi, drum scanner cannot capture
all of the image data from a piece of K25 or Velvia. And if it could, the
file would be absolutely gigantic. Easy to store, exceedingly painful to
move from one process to another. Unless, of course, your name is George
Lucas.

Kodak jumped into the digital river in a big way, and nearly got swept over
the falls. So they are backing off rapidly. I believe they discovered that
easily usable professional technology is still way out there. It's a *huge*
money sink. What's the market for a $250k digital camera/workstation.
What's the market for a dynamite professional film. My local Pro lab
(Calypso Imaging) is attempting to keep their digital head above water.
Technology changes so rapidly that by the time they get a piece of
equipment in and personnel trained, it's outdated. Because of the high
turnover of technology, digital labs have to charge a lot of money for
their services. Digital prepress, of course, is a somewhat different story.

Kodak is working on a new Kodachrome and we also know that they now have
Kodachrome "minilabs". I know about the Kodachrome because I just
participated in a Kodachrome test for Kodak and had to answer questions
like "what would we have to do to Kodachrome to get you to use it over your
current favorite film (Velvia)?" The answer is simple. Brightness, color
saturation, and resolution like Velvia, and locally processable. I will not
ship my precious film across the country to be processed by an unknown lab.

Hope all you USA LUGgers had your fill of either Turkey or Tofurkey.

The previous, of course, is just my humble opinion (JMHO),

Jim