Konica/Minolta no more cameras ?
Discussion
Damn.
I was just becoming impressed by their 800 and 1600 ISO 35mm films.
With Kodak and Konica gone that just leaves Fuji, and not for long I bet.
I wonder if digital files will last as long as negatives in reality.
Imagine trawling round in someones attic one day and dicovering some digital files on a CD. Or rather a strange looking round thing made of some odd opaque and brittle material. Do you think - "I must try to find somethning that tells me what this is and maybe will need an ancient device to do something with it" or do you just bin it as a health hazard?
At least with negatives you could easily see if there might be anything of interest.
How much human knowledge will be lost with the first international power failure?
Never mind, a few hundred thousand years from now our descendants will be staring at rock paintings and stone carvings and wondering who their ancestors were really ... it would be the same even if we still had negatives.
I was just becoming impressed by their 800 and 1600 ISO 35mm films.
With Kodak and Konica gone that just leaves Fuji, and not for long I bet.
I wonder if digital files will last as long as negatives in reality.
Imagine trawling round in someones attic one day and dicovering some digital files on a CD. Or rather a strange looking round thing made of some odd opaque and brittle material. Do you think - "I must try to find somethning that tells me what this is and maybe will need an ancient device to do something with it" or do you just bin it as a health hazard?
At least with negatives you could easily see if there might be anything of interest.
How much human knowledge will be lost with the first international power failure?
Never mind, a few hundred thousand years from now our descendants will be staring at rock paintings and stone carvings and wondering who their ancestors were really ... it would be the same even if we still had negatives.
It is a real pity that they are getting out of the market. Even ignoring the demise of film, their DSLRs were always coming out well in the tests and, particuarly with the 5D often beating the Canon and Nikon equivalent models. Even though I went for Canon in the end due to preferring the 'feel' of the 20D over the KM7D, the Nikons (D50&D70) or the 350D, I wonder how much KM have been 'killed' by the marketing of the bigger 2? Is this another case of Betamax vs VHS etc?
LongQ said:There's a scene in Richard Lester's 1959 short 'The Running Jumping Standing Still Film' where IIRC Spike Milligan places a
Imagine trawling round in someones attic one day and dicovering some digital files on a CD. Or rather a strange looking round thing made of some odd opaque and brittle material. Do you think - "I must try to find somethning that tells me what this is and maybe will need an ancient device to do something with it" or do you just bin it as a health hazard?
Never mind, a few hundred thousand years from now our descendants will be staring at rock paintings and stone carvings and wondering who their ancestors were really ... it would be the same even if we still had negatives.
record on a tree stump, puts a nail in one hand and a megaphone in the other and runs around the tree stump arms outstretched so playing the record!!!
>> Edited by elderly on Friday 20th January 08:59
LongQ said:
Or rather a strange looking round thing made of some odd opaque and brittle material.
Not sure that will happen. Would you think that if you saw an LP or an 8-track? Or a 5 1/4inch disk? Granted finding something to access those items (LP aside) might be a tough job!
For every negative that is nicely preserved there are probably 10,000 that gut chucked in a bag and ruined/thrown away. The same is true of digital images. I transfer mine on to multiple media and whenever new technology is available (eg DVD+R) I transfer onto that. when HDDVD/BLURAY becomes mass market, I'll move on. However I bet 95% of people who shoot digitally don't do this, so no different to film negatives there either.
_dobbo_ said:
Granted finding something to access those items (LP aside) might be a tough job!
For every negative that is nicely preserved there are probably 10,000 that gut chucked in a bag and ruined/thrown away.
I quite agree. I know a lot of the negatives in our family (not that tha means much) have been lost over the years along with prints and so on. In fact I know pro's who have also lost images in simple things like house or office moves. But the real point was that with a negative you can simply look at it to see what it is an whether it is of interest. Can't do that with a CD.
With an old aural device you can tell what it is and be fairly sure that it contains something that will reproduce sounds on the right translation device. What the sound are like you don't know.
A CD or other computer medium could be anything. Do you bother to check? No good just holding it up to the light!
There are pros and cons on both side but interesting and chance 'discoveries' will, I suspect, become less frequent as time passes
I wonder what opportunities that opens up ...?
imperialism2024 said:
*shrugs*
I don't see what's so bad about copying digital data to new formats every so many years.
Nothing, if it is done.
Most people, me included recently I realise, don't do regular backups of any sort. So the chances of of anyone but professionals planning and scheduling regular media transfers with and ever growing volume of files, is quite small.
And unless something dramatic comes along - like a multi-terrabyte i-pod Nano sized picture viewer with built in projector which will still work in 80 years from now - I could imagine the majority of images being seen only briefly shortly after they are taken. Especially if people convert to AV rather than printed family photo albums.
Now this may not matter at all. But many of us seem to get great pleasure from discoveries of old shots - especially when they bring back long forgotten memories. (OK, so you have to be getting on a bit to understand the attraction of that!)
I have some boxes of 35mm slides taken by family members over many years. Most are boring holiday shots, many have faded badly and I have dumped the worst. But the point is that with an unaided eye and sunlight I can se what is on them (to some extent at least). Can't do that with a CD as far as I know. So viewing requires set up and activity before discovery what is there. A bit like cine film. So it never gets viewed unless converted to video or perhaps DVD - both of which assume that their respective playback devices will continue to exist in order for the images to be recoverable. But will they?
I'm not sure the majority of people will think it good value to have to keep replacing technology to transfer 'old' pictures just in case they or a future generation might want to look at them at some point in the future.
And, back to my original point, how would they know there was something to look at? And that is was worth the effort of extraction from its place of storage?
[speculation]In a few years time every TV will have the equivilent of a media centre pc built in. This means that if the files are anywhere on your network, and you will have a network, you will be able to just bring them up on your TV so won't need to set anything up. By this time broadband connection speeds will be available up to 1gb and most people will subscribe to a data warehousing service for backing up thier files. [/speculation]
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