Ever give any thought to just how many prototype photos have been taken over the years? Certainly in the 10s of thousands, if not the 100s of thousands. They feed an ever growing list of books targeted to the fan...Morning Sun Books, for example, has published how many all color volumes so far? And they don't seem to be running out of material.

If I could, I would thank all those photographers, obscure and famous, whose work has brought us such riches.

More like well into the millions. I have taken almost 10,000 myself, starting in about 1962.

Wyhog

Wonder how many digital pictures (as a percent, say) will be useable in 100 years, and how would that compare with the film pictures from 100 years ago?

I don't know about todays digital pic, but at least as technology changes you can always load the digitals without loss and resave in the new whatever format, not necessarily so for film pic.

Film negatives and prints from 100 years ago are still viable because they are B&W which is a fairly stable image process. But all of the color shots from the 1930s onward are already fading badly, many are already useless. There will soon be a big hole in the photographic record if those color slides etc are not digitized soon.

Wyhog

There is still a LOT of color slides and movie film that still exists these days that was properly processed and stored is going to be around much longer than blue-ray discs or whatever follows. Wyhog says digitize soon, and at the present time, that is good advice. But digitize to what? How many video storage formats have we seen since the late 50's, starting with 2" quad, 3/4, Betamax, VHS, 1", D1, D2, D3, 8mm, Hi-8mm, Betacam, BetacamSP, DVC Pro, DVC ProHD, Betacam HD, DVD+R, DVD -R, and a lot more I can't remember. It will never stop. If you have a lot of VHS tapes you want to save, go buy a new $60 VHS player from Wallyworld, and store it properly. Your old VHS tapes will LONG outlast your present players, with rubber belts. But alas, the new ones will not last forever, either.

Sounds like you've been in "the" industry, Mike.

Consider also 8" floppy disks; 5-1/4" single sided, double sided, high density; 3-1/2" disks single- and double-sided; the many backup tape formats and machines and the "special" disk drives...

Yes, and before I retired, I used to buy all this stuff for my TV post production company. It was hard to keep up with all of it. I think my inventory list of video products was 50 or 60 items, in varying formats and lengths. The most expensive item, at our cost, was about $300 for a 120 minute digital tape. But now, this format is out of fashion, and the few pieces of stock we have sits in our vault gathering dust. But, there are a few PBS stations that still use it, so we can sell it to them.

Hey Mike, I've still got an Ampex ADO in my suite. (Remember those?) $53,000 when new and worth ZERO today. Talk about being obsolete. It's still in the rack and connected, but it has not been turned on for over 10 years.

How about D9? (JVC's Digital S format.) I've got one of those, too. And a 1-inch machine. And a CMX 3400. All sitting in the suite gathering dust while a fairly straightforward PC sitting on a desk can do things with video that I could only dream about with the old linear suite.

Progress...

quote:

Originally posted by OGR Webmaster:
Hey Mike, I've still got an Ampex ADO in my suite. (Remember those?) $53,000 when new and worth ZERO today. Talk about being obsolete. It's still in the rack and connected, but it has not been turned on for over 10 years.

How about D9? (JVC's Digital S format.) I've got one of those, too. And a 1-inch machine. And a CMX 3400. All sitting in the suite gathering dust while a fairly straightforward PC sitting on a desk can do things with video that I could only dream about with the old linear suite.

Progress...

Ampex ADO !! I used one of those at the first TV station I worked out when I graduated from college. They had a GrassValley 1600 with the E-MEM panel..now that was fun!

Not all the color shots - it depends on the type. The basic film for B/W and color is the same - a plastic base and a lot of highly refined gelatin. For B/W we are talking actual silver in the emulsion while with color we are talking color dye. Color fade is a dye stability issue. In the case of Kodachrome the actual film is/was B/W and the developing process used chemistry to do a dye transfer. In the case of the Autochrome process (pre-Kodachrome) the film is B/W and the RGB dye is in the fine ground bits of potato that are coated on the translucent screen. In both cases the dyes are extremely stable and as a result, properly stored Autochrome and Kodachrome film(100 years ago this year for Autochrome and 72-74 years for Kodachrome) are still as vibrant as they were back when.

The problem is the dye stability of some of the later color emulsions. I suspect this is also going to be an issue with the dye stability of prints made using the color printers connected to the computers of today.

We finally swapped our last working 2" quad VTR to a former chief engineer who was opening his own conversion shop in exchange for his labor in converting our remaining 2" program tapes to a modern digital format -- which one I can't recall. I think he took a hanger queen or two for spare parts as well, but what he really wanted was the inventory of fresh heads for the machines. And $300 sounds about what we were paying for those two hour 2" tapes.

Green Frog, Pentrex, and the others who create video programs from old movies of trains -- wonder what they are using to do this? I know at one time we had "film chains" (these actually pre-dated tape recorders) with which we could broadcast or convert 16mm movies. They died long ago, and our last conversions used video cameras pointed at the screen upon which we were 'showing" the movies.

I have the Kodachromes my dad took in the late 1950s and early 60s, and they look like new. The 1960s and 70s color neg film is shifting colors but I can still make a print. As for digital, there is no reliable way to store them for decades. The best advice is to make archival prints of the stuff you really want to keep.


Kent in SD