Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/04/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Brian: I think the problem with digital is not only can that the medium can degrade over time, the devices used to decode it will change as they have for music. That's going to cause problems for people who need to constantly convert their photos as digital evolves. Think about the music industry... 45 speed records 33 speed records reel-to-reel tape 8 track tape cassette tape CD Six different format changes for listening to music in about 30 years. Think about what that means for digital photography. Constant conversion if you want to look at your old pictures. It's the device change over that scares me. - -Mark - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Reid" <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> To: <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 4:13 PM Subject: Re: [Leica] Film Demise > The funny thing about "the end of film" is that there is almost no way > to make an image that will last 200 years other than to record it on > film or paper. > > I can imagine a future in which photography is digital, but images are > stored on film. They would be stored not as images, but as digital > signals; if you put the film in an enlarger what you would see would > not be the image, but odd geometric patterns that encoded the zeroes > and ones that represented the image. > > This would be black-and-white film, of course; color film is not stable > enough. > > No current digital medium is known to last more than 25 years. People > suspect that CD Roms will, but no one knows. But we know film lasts 100 > years, because we have 100-year-old film that still holds its > information. > >