Kodachrome comes through after 42 years to help solve JFK assassination!

[johndc]

"Guys, you missed the point altogether"

 

We got the point: Kodachrome has great resolving detail and lasts a long time. Whoa! Stop the presses!

 

Seriously, what did you expect people to say about it except "I knew that."

 

You should be happy this thread evolved into anything at all, since the original topic gives it nowhere to go (except a bunch of people patting themselves on the back for using Kodachrome all these years).

[pics]

CD "rot" is a well documented phenomenon and shows that digital storage devices are not all universally archival. I think people too often use extreme examples to prove their point. Assuming Al-Qaeida doesn't fly a plane into one's building or you're not hit by the storm of the century, unattended film stands a better chance of being usable at a later date than a digitally stored image. Can digital be more archival than film? Yes it can, but as has already been pointed out, it is very labor intensive you need to be very determined and disciplined. The moment this stops, all that hard work put into archiving your files is for nothing. While I'm not arrogant enough to think my images should last forever, it would be nice to know that some pics of family and friends could be used and seen by younger generations. The best chance of this happening is for me to shoot film. For pictures not belonging to NASA, government agencies or other well funded entities, the idea that images stored as digital files will be maintained and survive generations down the road is borderline laughable.

[randrew1]

I'll make another attempt to clarify my arguments. I doubt I will convince Mr. Jones, but I can live with that.

 

"'Silver halide or thermal prints will not last forever, but chances are good they will outlive the digital media.'

 

Based on what?"

 

Based on simple logic. Silver halide and thermal prints will last for 50 to 100 years or more. Most of us wont. Some of my digital images are recorded on the CD-R's with gold foil and phthalocyanine dye that may last for 300 years. (Kodak started selling these disks again at about 10x the price of the cheap ones.) Some of my images are Kodachrome slides. If my box of images happens to survive for 200 years, the Kodachrome slides will be easily recognizable. If my descendants find them, I'll bet they will take a look. The high quality CD's will still be readable and there will be some institutions that will have working devices to recover the images. Will my descendants bother to do this? I doubt it.

 

In my earlier post, I mentioned the advice of archiving experts at the Eastman House Museum to digitize everything and fund an IT staff in perpetuity. They also said that if you can't fund the IT staff, don't bother with the digitization because eventually, the files will be lost. My conclusion from their recommendation is that amateur collections should be in human readable form. They need to be on a media that will survive decades of neglect and be easily accessible to future generations. That's where I come to Ektachrome Dupe film. It is about as stable as Kodachrome and the film and processing will be around longer.

 

It is possible to get digital media that will last for 200 years. It is possible to get human readable media that will last for 200 years. Our descendants are more likely to keep the human readable stuff.

[pics]

Good points Ron. IMO, the best method for ultimate archaivability would be to shoot on a proven film with a proven archival track record like Kodachrome or B+W and scan to get a digital file thus obtaining the best of both worlds. In the likelyhood that the files are lost, corrupted or unreadable 80 years down the road, at least there is a durable "hard copy" still available. I have CD's from the early 90's that are unreadable or skip and reloop to no end despite being stored properly. About a year ago I received some family negs from 1918 which had defects and such but still provided very good prints after a little retouching. They had been stored in a manilla envelope. The thought of being able to do this with a "rediscovered" 80 year old CD seems unlikely. Fading, scratches and color shifts can be corrected to an great extent but one issue with a digital file or CD can render the image lost forever.

[jeff_drew4]

I have been thru the museum in Dallas and stood on "the grassy knoll". The experience was moving. In the context of the film revealing details, it shows that some still have questions and are doing research decades after the event. It does not surprise me that people miss details in pictures after multiple passes. Kodachrome is a fantastic film! My family has left me dozens of 8mm taken with a Kodak camera, and they are wonderful recordings of my childhood and the trips we took! Each time I watch, memories are refreshed - sometimes corrected. I still occasionally use Kodachrome for special trips and events where the images will outlive me and be passed on to my children . . .and theirs. My intention is to catch bits of events and pass them on . . . perhaps relate a story.

[terence_spross1]

Never fear: The JFK Kodachrome has now been digitized. So one way or another it will survive.

[wieslaw1]

There is a recent photographic album - Maholy Nagy and his

experiments in color (do not remember the exact title). His color

photographs were taken before the II nd WW, in the thirties -

apparently they survived until the III rd millennium.

 

I have an 8mm movie which my father shoot after I was born

during the war (taken with Siemens camera). Must have been

made in 1943 or 44, most likely on Agfa film. The colors are still

there, although they have never been as brilliant as that of

contemporary films.