Re: Digital

Tom Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> d c wrote:
> > 
> > "Tom Phillips" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > 
> > > You may "save" on having to buy film but you "lose" by not having a
> > > permanant, bonafide image that can be stored literally ever (i.e., is
> > > free from data corruption and media obsolescence.) Nothing is more
> > > permanant than putting and storing your images on film.
> > 
> > Huh?  Then why is the motion picture academy desperatly trying to restore
> > all those prints that are rotting in their canisters?  Yes, I know we have
> > different chemistry for film than we did in the early 20th Century, but film
> > is hardly as permanent ad binary code...
> 
> Because they were stored improperly, with no consideration for their
> permanance or future value. Once the money was made from the movie, they
> were tossed into a hot, vault and left to rot, that's why. You're
> speaking of old nitrate-based movie films. Nitrate hasn't been used as a
> film support for decades, but even if film were still nitrate based all
> you have to do is store it properly. Anything will "rot" if you go out
> of your way to allow it. 

Modern film stocks also decay, and especially color dye images decay.

> Digital isn't permamant, and it won't matter how you store it. Don't
> kid yourself. It's just data, not a real image. Hard disks are
> magnetic media, which after a few years time the magnetic particles
> that allow storage and access to that data decay and lose the
> ability to store and maintain the data. Non-magnetic storage mediums
> (CDRs) are only temporarily secure, plus the technology used to
> write and access data on CDs has and is changing rapidly so that
> what you store on a CDR may not even be readable by the technology
> available 20-30 years from now. And that's if the CD is even still
> extant. I have an "old" burner (just 5 years old..) that can't even
> write to or read the current crop of CDR disks. CDRs do in fact
> decay after only a few decades (the stamped layers literally come
> apart or the dye layers fade, causing data corruption, and it
> happens regardless of *how* you store the CDs.)  Digital isn't
> permanent, it's just data and data is technology-device dependent.

> Film doesn't have any of those issues. it's not data, it's a real,
> extant image. It's it's own permanant storage medium. Technology isn't
> needed to retrieve it or view it. It will in fact outlast any digital
> storage medium, according to Dr. James P. Reilly at Rochester's Image
> Permanance Institute. If properly stored, an image on film can last
> literally thousands of years. Modern polyester based sheet film supports
> are virtually indestructable. Acetate films simply require controlled
> storage conditions. You don't have to constantly and redundantly "back
> up" the data on newer and newer technology -- which for most
> photographers means copying and recopying thousands of stored images
> every few years -- in order to ensure permanance. Even if some "data"
> corruption of an image on film takes place, the image is still
> retrievable and usable. We have photographs that are nearly 200 years
> old and counting, and show no signs of "rotting." With digtal, any data
> corruption at all and the entire image is gone. Permanantly.

Nice phrasing, but I'm afraid "real data" is more permanent than "just
an image" in my experience. 

You over-estimate the permanence of film by a *lot*.  I have severely
faded slides and negatives taken during my lifetime, including some
taken by me.  The ones taken by me I pretty well know the storage
conditions of, and they're close to as good as it gets (short of
controlled-humidity refrigerated storage).

While many of your points on digital archiving are accurate, you
overplay your hand.  In particular, a single-bit error doesn't ruin an
entire image inherently and necessarily.  Even in jpeg format, it at
most damages the parts of the image after it; and there are other ways
to archive images. 

> If you want to believe the fallacy that digital is permanant, or is more
> permanant than film, it's your choice. But it's a lie.

Well, actually it's more complicated than that. 

B&W film lasts better than anything in *untended* storage.

Color film does okay in careful archiving for modest periods, but
requires refrigeration (and then humidity control) for really long
life -- which means stuff just lying around, even in a residential
area, *doesn't* survive all that long.

Digital does fairly poorly if just left lying around -- magnetic media
maybe 5 to 20 years.  CDs longer.  However, if managed well, the
information has the potential to last any length of time you want,
something which is *not* true of film images. 

The issue of having to copy "thousands of photos" is semi-bogus -- the
new medium is nearly always larger than the old one, so you can just
bulk-copy everything.  You don't actually have to deal with each
single image separately.

In fact, hard drives are growing so fast that what actually makes
sense, for individual photographers, is to keep everything online,
with copious and frequent backups.  Thus you're never really dealing
with an archaic medium, you're really dealing with your current active
drive and your current backups. 

One of the *big* benefits of digital archives is that they can be
replicated and stored in multiple ways in multiple locations.  This
*greatly* increases the chances of images surviving various sorts of
problems (fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, hurricane, civil unrest).
Consider the Kennedy negatives that were lost because they were stored
safely in a bank vault -- under the World Trade Center (the
photographer was Jacques Lowe I believe).

In 750 years, there will be essentially *no* photographs from this era
known because their original physical medium has survived, and
millions of photographs from this era (including many originating on
film) that are known because they survived in digital archives. 
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <noguns-nomoney.com> <www.dd-b.net/carry/>
Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net>  Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera/Steven Brust: <dragaera.info/>