At 11:11 05/01/99 -0500, you wrote:
>The real point is the differences between immature and rapidly evolving
>technologies, such as computers, versus fairly mature technologies like
>cameras.
Absolutely. Digital photography is at the Daguerrotype stage, and how many
people still use *that* process :-) Digital technology shows no signs of
maturing at present, but I don't doubt it will some day.
>It's also very likely that an extreme few, if any,
>of these digital cameras will fall into the "collectable" niche
A very fair point. An early Leica is worth rather more than most of its
contemporaries. But that perhaps has as much to do with its "feel", as a
quality object, than with its technological significance. I love the feel
of my OM-1n - it feels like it's precision engineered and assembled. The
wonderbricks don't have that feel at all, and I very much doubt if any of
the digital cameras do either. A friend has an EOS-something-or-other with
a 28-85 zoom, and there is significant play in the lens - you can feel the
front element wobble relative to the barrel. There may well be a genuine
design reason for that, but it *feels* horrible!
>
>> Compare the digital and wet darkrooms as well...... Potentially lower
>> materials costs are soon gobbled up by equipment depreciation. And I'll
>> bet my last enlarger bulb that in 30 years' time you won't be able to get
>> Zip drives and whatever repaired, so what of your archived digital pix
>> then.....? ;-)
>
>You need to put them on CD-Rs now, switch to DVD-Rs in 2007 , and then
>tell your intelligent agent to copy your whole DVD collection those
>terabyte 3D datacubes in 2025 or so....
This is my point really - that with the present rate of progess of
techology and the average lifetime of storage formats, it's going to be an
expensive business keeping a digital image archive in a useable form for a
period comparable to the lifetime of a chemical image. The upside, as you
rightly point out, is that there is *no* deterioration of a digital image,
provided of course it's not stored in a lossy format like jpeg when it will
deteriorate each time it is opened and saved again.
Now where did I put that eight-inch floppy drive...? <g>
Cheers
Richard
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