Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/04/06

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Subject: [Leica] Re: i get no respect
From: timswan <timswan@blazenetme.net>
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 19:45:33 -0400

Wilber,

I agree that digital may get to the same quality level as film someday 
soon. The bigger problem is storage. Technology is moving so quickly that 
it's pretty hard to judge what will be available in 40 years. Do you 
store on hard disk? Just think about how many flavors of SCSI and IDE 
we've seen in the last 10 years--do you really think your hard disk will 
be usable? CD's? Nope, as the archival properties on these seems to be 
around 10 years or so.

An even a bigger problem is what format to you store your photos in? 
TIFF, PNG, JPEG? I doubt that these formats will be around in 40 years.

The Smithsonian has said that the biggest problem facing the museum is 
the deteriorating state of information stored on tape, or disk. Much of 
the material is lost data due to deterioration, and much of it is 
unreadable because no equipment exists to read it. They project costs in 
the billions to transfer as much as possible to newer technologies.

I agree that there will most likely be solutions to some of the problems 
that digital poses, but there will be new problems created by the 
accelerating obsolesence of technology.

35 mm., on the other hand, is high in quality, has good archival 
properties, is scannable, and is the photography equivalent of ASCII. I 
plan on using my Leicas for a long, long time.

Tim

>Ted and Mark
>
>Sounds like what folks said about the car and the telephone, nah it'll 
>never last.
>Wake up fellas that's what they're making 20 gig hard drives for and 
>bigger. I don't
>think film will go away anytime soon, but digi's not going anywhere-it or 
>some clone
>of it is here to stay. There are a lot of lazy photogs out there that 
>can't find negs
>they shot last week let alone 40 yrs ago and those that do have forty yr  
>old negs 1/2
>of them are not printable. Not all of the rest of the world has it 
>together like some
>of you do.
>Cheers Wilber