A long time ago someone told me that CDs and DVDs would degrade and eventually become unplayable. My collections would be lost.

This was the format, if I recall, that was supposed to be so durable that, unlike vinyl, it would resist dust, fingerprints, scratches, and so on. You could even drop them.

Didn't turn out that way. If I have so much as a hair on a DVD, let alone the slightest scratch, particularly on a movie rental, the DVD will skip. Sometimes it skips even when the disc looks perfectly clean. I have found this to be the case with various players over the years. Occasionally I am supposed to "clean the laser lens" of each of my CD and DVD players. I have to keep the discs immaculate, handling them more delicately than any other format I have used. I'm not supposed to leave CDs in the car or play them in the car stereo during extreme heat or cold weather. Blank CDs burned on my Mac will not play on my Marantz CD player, which is supposed to be an audiophile brand.

Then you've got mp3s driving out CDs and vinyl. Ipods fail. Good news for Apple. For us, not so much. I remember VHS tapes breaking from overuse. Cassette tapes would tangle or snap. I never owned 8-tracks or reel-to-reel.

In my youth, I bought LPs that often turned out to be warped and unplayable. I had to ask the record-store salesman to open the LP and try it on his turntable before I purchased a new one. Amazing how often the salesman would open one, two, three new albums only to find that they were too warped to play and thus sell. I took care of my vinyl religiously, using D3 Discwasher solution and its dustpad before every play, storing them in static-free sleeves that a local, private record shop gave me for free. I played LPs on my Dad's Bang & Olufsen turntable that had an automatic tonearm. I pressed the button, the tonearm moved horizontally, read where the record was, then dropped the needle slowly onto the record. No chance of scratches.

I remember seeing my grandparents 78s, which I wish I had kept. But the ones I saw, though heavy, were fragile and broke easily.

Edison cylinders: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

Hard drives die. Tape drives were popular some years ago. Floppies of various sizes, Zip disks, cartridges. And now ebooks threatening the end or diminishment of paper.

What do you think is the most durable medium or format? Not just for music. Anything. Archiving.

Stone tablets? Not practical today, but those cave painters & chiselers sure made their mark. Papyrus worked for centuries. You can buy all kinds of acid-free, archival paper, but I noticed that after several years the laser-printer ink on my college thesis, professionally bound in hardcover, had faded and smudged. Same with inkjet, pencil, and highlighters. A typewriter worked better because it pounded an impression onto the page. A fountain pen, so I've heard, scratches ink into the paper.

I can't help thinking that our history is being lost. How far can mankind extend itself, its information and knowledge into the future?

If you know of any books about this subject, archiving and so on, let me know. Related books I have read:

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia by Greg Benford
A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World by Basbanes
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History by Basbanes
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

The Long Now Project is using engraved discs, about an inch across, made of a nickel alloy and etched with microscopic printing.

A silicon nitride/tungsten alloy can hypothetically preserve information for billions of years.

Long time reliability of data media is a perennial problem, and without adding to the current options, I'd like to add that the problem extends to the associated hardware. With solutions coming and going, you don't just depend on the data carrier's reliabilty, but also on that of the reader/writer hardware, which eventually tends only to be available on the used goods market, if you're lucky.

All that said, I have a slightly more positive view of optical storage than you. Given good quality blanks, strictly following storage suggestions helps extend the life of burned discs. Once you start using discs all over the place, however, many if not most bets are off. Of course, the optical disc technology is nearing its end in its current form(s), and that means that you'll be looking for a successor option, and moving your important data there. It looks like that might keep on happening several times in a user's lifetime, at least for the foreseeable future. Welcome to the brave new world of digital storage!

I linked my daughter, who's a book conservator, to your (She called it great!) post, and part of her response was that "The NEDCC - - Northeast Document Conservation Center - - has a lot of free material online to educate people about the fragilities and preservation needs of lots of media. They're book and paper specialists but they also deal with photographs and magnetic media, as well as digital media from the perspective of preservation digitization, which gets into some of the issues deniro raises. He may find this (from NEDCC) and this (from The Library of Congress) interesting.

'Since his reading list doesn't include leather, I'd add the 1905 Report of the Committee on Leather for Bookbinding (here), which is not a history book like the others but an assessment and call to action. This committee was constituted to address the problem of 19th century books degrading far more rapidly than older books due to the poor quality of leather that was being produced during that period and poor storage environments. Their recommendations informed bookbinding practice from that point forward, and were profoundly influential in the setting up of library preservation standards that are still followed today."

Thanks very much for the links.

You're welcome.

I hope you find them interesting, if not useful.

And at the other extreme of data preservation, I've often thought about the Fahrenheit 451 approach and what the classics might sound like after having been "handed down" by word of mouth 10 or 20 times?

I wonder what John Cleese would do with the idea?

Anybody up to the task?

Pick up and read any Bible or Torah. Many of the books in the Pentateuch were handed down through oral tradition for millennia before writing was invented. Most of what is called the New or Greek testament was at least 80 to 100 years old before it was ever written down and it is highly unlikely those who wrote it down were alive at the time they were writing about.

Monty Pythons Flying Circus has done several sketches on the Bible and Bilblical stories.

Many major universities today have entire libraries dedicated to collecting oral stories and traditions, some dedicated to specific historical events such as WWII.

Of course the problem with any oral tradition transitioning into a written one is that the concepts, beliefs, etc. then become "written in stone" (originally, this was literally the case most likely!). Changes are more difficult when the written word is present, and this may have resulted in the "commentary genre". At least with an oral tradition any commentary was done in the head of the presenter before being spoken and the recipients may never have known that they were receiving a modified version.

Which is preferable probably depends on what is presented and its consequences.

In the ancient oral tradition the listeners heard the stories over and over again from the time they were small children and they knew the stories word for word as well as the story teller did. Tradition holds that any time the story teller would vary in the slightest from the last telling, the audience would immediately and vociferously correct him/her. This built in editorial board served to maintain a relatively high degree of consistency. In fact this is alluded to in Fahrenheit 451 in the way the "Book people" were learning their story and passing it along to the next generation.

Strangely enough, it was when things began to be written down and attempts were made to merge stories from different traditions that inconsistencies and contradictions began to creep in. Thus the two creation stories in the Biblical book of Genesis. One coming from the traditional stories of the sea peoples the other from the desert peoples' tradition. Even more contradictions and errors crept into the Biblical texts when written texts were copied by earnest monks, the majority of which could neither read nor write and merely copied what they saw on the page before them, fly specks and all.

Indeed it is those illiterate monks and their diligent copying ("fly specks and all") that are responsible for some of the mathematical symbols we use today; symbols that seem to have no relation to the concept in which they are used (two that come to mind are the percent sign % and the radical sign √), but that's a story for another day.

Interesting.

http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

Remember that old saying? If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Still, it's interesting. On the other hand, I'm at the age when I don't particularly care if my data outlives me. My main concern is that none of my wines outlive me.

I almost agree with you, Jon, but just think how appreciatively your survivors will fête your life with a glass or several of superb vintage supplied via your passing.
(When life/death gives you grapes, make wine.)
Salut. Cheers. Skaal. Skål. Na zdorovje. Prost. Egészségére.

I'm reminded of an old gag about a man's passing. The lawyer read the will, which said, "Being of sound mind, I spent every dime that I had before I died." I'll extend that to the wine.

The "Mdisk" idea is interesting, but I think it's a gimmick. It does no good to have a disk that can endure the ages if the reader and the file format are lost.

DVD drives are being replaced by Blu-Ray. As time goes on it will be harder and harder to find a DVD player any more, just as it's now all but impossible to find a VHS player. When the next storage device after Blu-Ray comes along, it will be hard to find Blu-Ray players. At that point, what good will a DVD Mdisk be? In 40 years, will there be a working DVD player left anywhere? What's the point of a disk that can last hundreds of years if the player for it can't be found?

I used to work at a shop that used magneto-optical discs for archiving. These things were supposedly extremely stable, able to store information for centuries. But they never really became popular, as they were quite slow. Pinnacle Micro made the drives we had. It stopped making the drives a long time ago. You can still occasionally find them on eBay...assuming you have a SCSI-equipped computer to connect them to! But those discs that could last for centuries and centuries? In ten or twenty years they'll still have data, sure...but so what?

My sister recently asked me whether she should convert some of her videotapes to DVD. These are homemade tapes, not store-bought movies.

At first, I wasn't sure. It ought to be obvious. I advised that although DVDs fail, or so I've heard, they are still a more durable medium than videotape. Many years ago, I had videotapes of TV shows that would eventually rip from being played too often. I concluded they were a cheap, disposable medium, w/poor quality video.

I suggested she make multiple copies of each tape on DVD-Rs, possibly on archival Verbatim blanks, in case some of them fail down the road.

Any thoughts?

> It does no good to have a disk that can endure the ages if the reader and the file format are lost.

In one episode of Cowboy Bebop, somebody sent Faye a Betamax tape...say no more.

Blue-Ray players can also play DVDs.

Given that Apple elected not to support blue-ray, and optical drives of any sort are no longer standard equipment on Apple computers, it appears likely that blue-ray and optical media in general will go the way of reel to reel, 8-track, and cassette tapes within the foreseeable future. Today's trend for archival storage is moving to the cloud, and solid state media of one type or another. (Apple now markets "PCIE flash storage" and not solid state drives).

That is not just in computers either, my 2015 Volkswagen does not have an optical media drive, but it does have a SD Card slot for the entertainment system and another for the navigation system.

Hard to believe the cloud will ever replace local storage.

Replacing may not be the best approach. As stated before, there isn't a single most durable medium for a reliable backup, as sooner or later each falls by the wayside. The trick is using several concurrent methods, while keeping abreast of obsolescence of both medium and reader. As such, and apart from issues like security and privacy, the cloud will work.

That's a big caveat. The cloud is less secure and reliable than an external drive hidden in a drawer.

My first post was intended to go beyond computer use.

In today's environment we tend to think of security solely in terms of malefactors but environmental factors must also be considered. Light (artificial or natural), oxidation, heat, humidity, fire, flood, and storm all have to be taken into account as part of data security and reliability. Many years ago the common recommendation for environmental security, included one copy in the computer, one copy on backup media such as a disk, and a third copy off premises in a bank safe deposit vault or preferably in a secure limestone cave. (The bank vault isn't that environmentally secure either, I have seen entire bank buildings, vault and all, ripped off of their foundations and scattered over two states by a tornado.)

The off premises element is virtually the only viable environmental security and there are companies that specialize in providing that kind of physical security — for a very nice price. Few users outside of major corporations have the data volume or value to make that kind of off premises storage economically or practically feasible. Thus the recent growth in cloud storage solutions. The "desk drawer" is among the solutions that are most vulnerable to environmental security considerations. Data breaches and theft make the headlines but environmental losses are equally if not more common. They just aren't glamorous enough to make the headlines and major data centers have adequate protection against environmental damage.

deniro,



I recently converted family VHS tapes into .mp4 files using this device: Elgato Video Capture. H.264 is also available.

There are some reviews and demonstrations available on YouTube.

For me, the storage medium for those videos is now a hard drive, back ups, and iCloud.

Neat idea, but a little pricey.

I guess I'm still surprised by how much faith people have in the cloud. I hate the idea of my data leaving the house.

I'm with Dianne — at least until the next thing comes along.

The problem with flash storage is that it isn't archival. In fact, it's quite transient.

Flash memory exploits some weirdness of quantum mechanics (specifically, a phenomenon called "electron tunneling," where electrons can move short distances without passing through the space in between) to store information. Each bit if information is represented by a transistor with a "floating gate," a part of the transistor that is totally surrounded by an insulating layer hat is smaller than the wavelength of an electron. Electrons can be made to tunnel into the gate; when they do, they're trapped, and the presence or absence of electrons in the gate represents a binary 1 or 0.

Unfortunately, random quantum fluctuations means that the electrons in the gate have a chance of tunneling out of the gate. This causes bit errors, which build up over time. After about ten years or so, the information on solid-state flash media may be completely unrecoverable.

I don't think there is a digital medium that is archival.

Ten years isn't so bad. In fact that is a few years longer than magnetic media and maybe about the same as inexpensive optical media. In the case of optical media the culprit is oxidation of the aluminum reflective layer used in most optical discs. Gold reflective layer archival optical discs are available, but tough to find and expensive.

Back in the days of mainframe computers and magnetic tape the standard protocols used to call for "exercising" stored tape reels annually and for the most critical archival data rewriting the tapes every few years. Arguments went back and forth over the efficacy of "exercising" and even rewriting tapes. It may be that periodic recopying of archival digital data, albeit at significantly longer intervals than back in the mag tape days, is still state of the art. The rewrite process can also provide the opportunity to migrate archived data to newer data formats and storage technologies. The work currently going on in "quantum" computers will be a huge "game changer" in terms of both computers themselves as well as data storage media. Who knows what the next decade will bring?

I really don't believe that leaving media on any specific medium is a good idea over the long term. The best defense against inaccessibility or age is periodic migration to newer medium. Don't wait until it's in a format that's a pain to convert or has begun to degrade.

Organization goes hand-in-hand with this. Media is no good to you if you can't find it later when you want to. I've got videos and even still images I made on my quickcam many years ago, and I know where to find them. For me, going to a new medium is as easy as a drag and a drop. And I can just keep the last one or two iterations as backups in case of loss.

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/archivalissues/index.html#d13jan2015

A little bit more about archiving: the unsuitability of flash drives, and one person who uses the M-disc.

The problem never been just the media, there is also the question of whether or not there will be devices capable of reading the media and software able to decode/play the data format. M-Disk is based on Blu-Ray technology and Apple computers no longer ship with any optical drives, much less Blu-Ray which Apple has never supported.

I came across a stash of magnetic tape cartridges last year months back for a backup magnetic tape drive I used to have on my PC back in the 60s. Out of curiosity I looked to see if I could find a drive for the tape cartridges and they are no longer manufactured and haven't been available on the market for probably 15 or 20 years. (As I recall they were only on the market for maybe 5 or 6 years). There may have been some files there I might like to have but basically they are irrecoverable because there is no player/recorder available. Even if I could find the applicable tape drive, the interface would likely be RS232, Parallel, or possibly SCSI and then there would be the issue of format to read the files. All in all I could spend a fortune trying to recover who knows what data files that may or may not have any relevance today. Even if I could play the tapes the data format has not been supported since probably the mid 1980s and there is nothing available today to convert to a current standard short of hundreds or even thousands of hours of painful manual interpretation and re-entry.

I think Virtual1 has it right. The only reliable archival storage plan is frequent migration from one media to another and in the process reformat the data to a current or, even better, an emerging standard. Given the rapidity of change in the industry the opportunity window for such reformatting and media transfer is becoming narrower every year.

Of course that makes sense. Maybe the guy who used the M-disc wanted the best format in the short-term, however long he wanted to define short, for his own purposes, with the understanding that eventually he would move to the next most reliable format at some point in his life.

I should probably re-read this thread to get my bearings. I noticed when I did genealogy that many valuable documents were on microfilm or microfiche. As far as I know, neither of those formats is used today.

But at least those formats and associated media are readable and always will be (until they disintegrate). As is very clear in this thread, such cannot be said of any digital media.
We're doomed, I tells ya, doomed!

Microfilm and Microfiche readers are still available in some libraries, but the media is too often crumbling. The libraries that still have these are scrambling to get all that data digitized, OCRed, and indexed to make it searchable and available on the internet. Even in the case of handwritten material they are manually adding searchable hidden text. Thank God for Graduate Assistants, they make great slave labor to apply to this task. Their children and grandchildren will probably have the job of migrating all of that to different media and formats when they are graduate students.

FWIW, yet another opinion: Tips for maintaining your media for eternity and beyond.

Really? This shocks me. Over the summer I bought my parents a Dell tower which includes not only an optical drive but bays for other drives. As is often the case, I don't know what the chiefs at Apple are thinking. The Dell runs quite well, Windows 8.1 is so far a pretty good OS, though of course it still has many Windows drawbacks. I don't know why Apple continues to marginalize itself in the name of innovation.

I've been re-reading the book Perfecting Sound Forever which, though flawed, really is a fine book for anyone interested in the history of audio technology. I would like to read more books like it but there don't seem to be any similar. You can still listen to Edison cyclinders, Edison's Diamond discs, and 78s. Edison thought about long-term durability, about composing for the ages. But he was an idealist and tinkerer more than a businessman. Although vinyl is still inferior in sound, unless perhaps you have an expensive system, it will still last longer than CDs.

You can still watch early film. At the same time, Martin Scorese is on a campaign to conserve old movies. You can still see daguerrotypes, which are startling in their realism, to me often sharper than what today's cameras produce. I asked my sister, who knows something about phtography, about digital cameras. She says they still don't compare to film.

All of this to say formats interest me.

It isn’t as shocking as it sounds; Apple still carries an external burner for around $70. But no, it doesn’t offer them as a built-in option anymore. Personally I prefer the external option anyway, as every disc drive I’ve ever had in Macs bit the dust after a year or two. And it’s not like Apple uses substandard drives: you’ll have the same problem regardless of the brand name on your computer. What with the current iMacs difficulty of access (and you can argue about that), an external drive makes more sense, and is way cheaper and quicker to replace when the time comes. Heck, even the Mac Pro doesn’t have internal drives anymore, of any type, or even space for them. It’s all external.

I thought the same thing. I made sure, when I got my laptop, that it came with an optical drive...

...and then I realized I hadn't touched it at all, so I took it out, put it in an external enclosure, and put a second hard drive in the space where it used to be.



That was true for a long time--in the high end, it was true up 'til about ten years ago (there were digital large-format cameras on the market back then that could surpass film in both resolution and dynamic range, but they cost upward of $180,000) and until just a couple of years ago in 35mm.

Modern high-end DSLRs--the kind you spend $2500 on, not the kind you spend $500 on--exceed film in resolution (by a healthy margin) and approach film's dynamic range. A Canon EOS-1D X will not only give you better sensitivity than the best film on the market, there's no contest--it's not even close. There's no perceptible noise even when you're shooting at ISO 1600. Tests show you'll see 11 stops of dynamic range at ISO 100, falling to 9 stops at ISO 12,800. By way of comparison, 35mm film is noisier and less sensitive, but offers moderately wider dynamic range; good 35mm film will give you about 14 stops of dynamic range[1], at a cost of lower sensitivity.

Low-light sensitivity in particular is where digital really shines. High-end DSLRs from Canon and Nikon can produce images you literally can't get on film, like this famous National Geographic image by photographer Iwan Bann, showing the blackout in New York City after Hurricane Sandy. Bann shot it with a Canon EOS 1D, and says that no film camera could cope with the combination of low light, motion, and high shutter speed necessary to get the shot.

[1] The wide dynamic range of 35mm film generally assumes exposing for shadows and clipping hilights, because negative film is more tolerant of overexposure than underexposure. You're getting a wide range by sacrificing detail in bright areas--so in that sense it overstates the case. If you measure the dynamic range of film without clipping, by exposing for hilights rather than shadows, you'll usually see more like 7-8 stops of dynamic range.

I recently attended a lecture given by an internationally known photographer Terry Evans introducing her latest commission, a series of photographs along the Trinity River in Fort Worth. During the question and answer period she was asked about the cameras she uses and she said the only film camera she still uses is a Hasselblad she reserves for taking aerial photographs of the midwestern plains — a project that she has been pursuing for decades. She went on to say she finds she can get images using digital cameras that would be impossible to capture with film cameras.

It's buried deep in the labyrinthine website, but Apple does still offer the (non-Retina) 13 inch MacBook Pro with 8x SuperDrive.

I stand corrected, but I'm sure deniro gets the drift anyway.

They also no longer ship with floppy drives

Apple will take their users, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the future. And a few years after they do, everyone is better off as a result. Attitudes usually go from "I can't live without that!" to "why didn't they ditch that crap sooner?"

I think she meant low-end cameras. What about the longevity of digital v. film?

Some recent podcasts about digital preservation from speakers at the Library of Congress. To me, interesting stuff.

Conversations about Digital Preservation (podcasts)

The longevity of digital files is...complicated. I have a friend who does this for a living for the Canadian government. It's a never-ending source of pain.

There are a bunch of factors: the longevity of the medium, the longevity of the ability to read the medium, the longevity of the file format (it does no good if you can recover a file in 100 years that nobody knows how to read!). You can stick a stash of properly fixed B&W photographs in an attic and come back in a century to find they're still intelligible. That's not the case with any digital medium I'm aware of.

Hi tacit!

You don't even have to be a super pro to get shots like Bann's. Here's night shot that I took with my new Canon EOS 6D, looking out of a hotel window in NYC at 3:00 AM. What's amazing about it is that I took the photo with the camera set on automatic and didn't even use a tripod! There are some things about the camera that I'm not so happy about, but you are absolutely right about the astonishing low light performance.

I worry less about the permanence of digital storage, which can always be serially transferred to new media, than about the longevity of printed photographic output. As you note, black & white film based pix hold up for extended periods of time, but color photos will fade pretty fast unless protected, a problem whenever you introduce pigments (in lieu of chemical reactions?) I suppose, whether in film or digital output. It's been especially, and hugely, problematic when it comes to stable paper/ink combinations for digital output, though, although they've made a whole lot of headway. The folks at Wilhelm Imaging have been plugging away on this subject since forever ago. I notice they reference the Corbis underground Sub-Zero Preservation Facility with which I was unfamiliar. Of course, if you've got the digital file, you can always print out another copy, but it's amazing how big a difference even the most minor change in paper, printer, or color management can make. It's sort of ironic because there have never been as many options (& variables) in potential colorants and substrates etc., including the ease of home printing, yet more and more photo viewing seems to be inexorably migrating to the web.

On the other hand, every embarrassing thing you've ever done online is preserved forever, so there's that. In any case, I think we may be saving, not losing, way too much stuff. The biggest problem will be extracting useable needles from those mountains of haystacks. After I pass, my kids are a lot more likely just to wipe my disks, drives and devices and shunt them off to some needy organization. Aside from presumably being dead, I could hardly blame them for that, when even I don't want to spend my time culling my files.

Thanks for posting the link to the Sub-Zero Preservation Facility (owned by Bill Gates); it's quite a project.

I wonder how much power it draws? (The women in the pic must be faaar hardier souls than I; they don't look like they're dressed for anything near -4º F.) (Edit: ...even considering the low relative humidity.)

(PS: Your "night shot" link is a dead-end.)

You're right on the money. Once in a while I go through my digital files and clean out all the stuff I stashed "to be read later when I have a moment" and often wonder why I saved it in the first place.

Have you ever seen The Tampa Story, in which "John D. Hackensacker", as he's writing down every penny he's spending in a little notebook, says to Claudette Colbert's character "I don't know why I write this all down; I never do anything with it."

I periodically use that scene as the springboard to a cleaning frenzy.

I haven't seen the movie but that line is as fitting as it is humorous.

The ease and near absence of cost in saving digital files discourages any thinking about the process. One analogy is film versus digital picture taking. When you had to pay for the printing, you were a little less likely to decide that every shot was a work of art worthy of posterity.

If I were to teach a course in photography, the final exam would be conducted with a reflex camera and a roll of black & white film.

404

Which underlines the other thing that film shooters did to minimize waste. Without being immediately able to see the result they took great pains in the composition, f stops, shutter speeds, et cetera to ensure the best outcome.

I once read that, when Alfred Stieglitz took up photography, he only shot a white cup and saucer, again and again, for the first nine months. That way he had a good grasp of what his camera was going to deliver, whatever the lighting or circumstance.

Tacit: I was interested that you mentioned the Long Now Project -- Brian Eno, the Long Now's, conceptual father, made one of the most insightful comments about politics ever:

Hopefully this Night Shot do-over will work!

I wanted to link the full-size photo directly, but alas, I'm still struggling with the various public/private settings on my SmugMug site.

My son just completed a university level course in photography. It broke down roughly 40% picture taking (composition, etc.) and 60% Photoshopping the raw image. The remaining camera store in the town where the university is located (population ~380,000) no longer carries offers film processing or carries any film cameras, processing equipment, or supplies. According to the store owner he sent all of that back after it had been on his shelves for nearly two years without any sales. The biggest camera store in Fort Worth, the 17 largest city in the country, will order film cameras but does not stock them.

Can anyone comment on film restoration, deterioration, or specifically why box sets of TV shows and movies sometimes look like crap?

If I buy a season of an old TV show, I don't always know what I'm getting. Last week I bought season one of The Drew Carey Show, the only season out on DVD, and I was surprised at the mediocre quality. Not terrible, but not what I had hoped. I guess the studio didn't put much effort into the transfer.

I can understand the difficulty of preserving videotape, such as the first season of Alf which appears to be filmed on video. The studio said the orginals where in such poor condition that they had to use copies used for syndication—therefore copies which had been edited for commercials. Other than that, they look fine.

Drew Carey aired on film. Yet it looks worse than my Gilligan's Island DVDs, both color and black and white. Does this mean recording quality is actually getting worse?

As you can see, my youth was misspent.

Very nice shot! (Where's your vantage point?)

Not only that, but I wonder if I could even fill a class with interested students.

Edit: Adding some perspective... I spend a considerable amount of time on the Coney Island Boardwalk over the summer, I see an enormous number of people with cameras, and I'm amazed and pleased that many of them are still carrying single or twin-lens reflexes as their only one. They certainly don't abound, but "sympathetic" stores do still exist.

And in a personal vein, I'm occasionally asked to pose, and I never (willingly, anyhow...there's not much I can do about the rude shooters) allow a digital photographer to shoot me; I refuse to allow myself to be deleted in the nearest bar!

Thanks artie. I took it out the window of a 24th floor hotel room, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan looking east across Central Park.


I thought it would be worth giving this Film/Digital conversation its own thread in the Audio,Video, Photography forum, where other potentially interested parties would be more likely to find it. So I started one.

Thanks, Judith. (I guessed that those two tall towers are "The Eldorado".)

The camera store here refers persons looking for film cameras to a store in Brooklyn so Coney Island is close to what may be one of the few remaining sources of film and film cameras. It is a bit far from here however. 1580 miles according to Maps.

BTW, they no longer sell film at either Walt Disney World or DisneyLand but I think you can still get a throwaway camera.

Alas. No more Kodak moments? Do they still have signs around the park that mark out "stand here for a nice shot" locations?

I really didn't notice when I was there in January but a vague recollection makes me think they are still there but perhaps without the Kodak logo. I am going back in May and will make it a point to look for them. I know where many of them were. What caught my attention in January was all the walls hiding multitudinous new attraction construction, especially in Animal Kingdom.

Superman memory crystals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_of_Solitude#Superman_film_series

Okay Ira, it is "the next time I am there" and the Kodak Picture Spots are all gone. They have been replaced with Nikon picture Spots

Alas, but makes sense. Thanks for the update.

Checking on that for you was as good an excuse as any for a trip to Walt Disney World but this time I had an even better excuse. My grandson was graduating from High School about 35 miles from there and the accommodations at WDW are a lot better than any motel in the area.

The real Superman memory crystal from Optoelectronics Research Center.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/22314...e-360tb-of-data