As far as archivability, this is a big problem. CD's and such will not only not last forever, but even if they did, would there be a reader out there in a couple of generations of gear that can read the data? You have to keep moving it to the next medium. The good thing is that if you keep doing this, the data is lossless from generation to generation, assuming reasonable error correction of course. The bad thing about our old negatives and slides is of course that there is no way to losslessly copy them to another generation of archive medium. But they don't do too bad, my chromes from a couple of decades ago still look bright and clean.
rg
Mick Maguire wrote:
Gonz wrote: "Now if only we could get digital microphones and digital speakers!!!"
When I last bought higher end audio back in the late eighties CD's were taking off big time in the UK. At that time manufacturers were branding everything including speakers as being "digital ready", or "digital optimized", or even "for digital music". This comes back around to what William Robb (I think) was saying about how digital is a sexy marketing word, how we are all conditioned to believe it's better because it is digital.
Personally I don't give a tinker's cuss what Joe Public uses, although I accept it's going to affect me in many ways. I just hope that I can get just a few years out of my new 645 (and I realize it's going to get harder and harder) before it becomes an expensive paper-weight.
For some reason I cant get excited about digital - maybe it's because I have spent the past 20 years writing PC software. I do think that quite a few people are going to be upset when in 5-10 years time they find they can't read their CD/DVD image archives due to degradation of the medium / heat damage / scratches / software and hardware compatibility. At least I will have my prints and negs (for a while at least)
Mick...
