On 10/16/2004 1:40 PM Claudio Bonavolta spake thus:

"David Nebenzahl" wrote in message
...

[my own comments snipped, since the respondent's newsreader made a terrible
hash out of them and I'm not about to take the time to reformat them]

The problem is not will we be able to read a digital format but will we be
interested enough to spend so much energy in trying to read such an obsolete
thing ? When you find a computer in trash, do you take it to discover all
these marvelous pictures it certainly contains ?

I don't, but in the (near) future, people called "archaeologists" and
"anthropologists" will do just that, to see how folks lived long ago.

I don't think so, you just consider it as rubbish.
When you encounter the equivalent in film, you easily can ccheck if it's
rubbish or not just using a pretty funny interface called "eyes".

Digital is a theorically perfect storage media provided you never forget
where your pictures are and you convert them at every major storage
technology change.

I would say that digital is "perfect" in one aspect: the ability to make
identical copies from an original or master, with absolutely no generational
loss, something not possible with optical media.[1] As to other aspects of
reproduction (like fidelity, tonality, etc.), I remain agnostic on the subject
(in other words, I don't know enough about it to really have an informed
opinion one way or the other).

Practically, digital will cause a loss of an amount of images we may have
kept if they were stored on film or paper.

Well, no, it won't: that's what I'm saying. Digital images may become
difficult to retrieve as time goes on and formats change, but not impossible.

By the way, please don't mistake any of this as an argument on my part in
favor of digital image-making. However, whether I'm fur or agin' it is
extremely irrelevant, as are most of our opinions on the matter. Like it or
not, digital is here to stay. Get used to it.


[1] Although if one considers making a number of prints from a negative, each
print can be identical with only the minimal loss due to printing, so
generational loss would be negligible in this case.


--
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a
really easy way: stop participating in it.

- Noam Chomsky