Does it concern you that you can not hold a digital image?

[joseph_leotta]

<p>my images pop much more on my 20 widescreen monitor than it would in any 4x6 print.<br>

In the old days that how I first saw most of my photos. Let alone the mega advantages of storage mentioned above.</p>

[mendel_leisk]

<p>I'm sure it's been discussed and tried, but: but how about a high resolution physical piece of film produced from the digital image? Just for insurance.</p>

<p>I've seen a demonstration where they can bombard a piece of hair with a jet of atoms, etching someone's name on it, for example. With room to spare.</p>

[Ray House]

<p>I tried to NOT hold or handle my negs as much as posible. Had to worry about dust, scratches and finger prints! I can hold a digital print in my hands, however I try not to handle those much either...dust, scratches and finger prints. I remember when people used to hold telegrams and now they are probably trying to figure out how to hold an email.</p>

[steve m smith]

<p>It seems to me that digital files stand most chance of staying in existence whilst the photographer is still alive as long as he/she is obsessive about backups. Past that point in time though, the negative wins out as all it has to do is sit in a box or a drawer somewhere.</p>

[steve m smith]

<blockquote>

<p>I just had a brilliant idea, how about a small pocket size 2x2 inch square digital photo viewer with a 1 inch by 1 1/4 inch viewing screen and is solar powered, so you have to hold it up to the sun to use it! how's that for nostalgia! i should patent that, it would sell millions.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That's brilliant! I could simplify the design though if there were some way to imprint each image onto a piece of transparent material - perhaps held in a rigid plastic frame.</p>

[tomwatt]

<p>Just to beat a dead-horse point, when you make a digital file copy, you in essence have multiple originals, not copies. Each and every copy being as usable and complete as the first. In some ways, that makes back, archiving and storage-safety far superior to having master negative files.<br>

Images, regardless of the format, are meant to be viewed. I couldn't help laughing about the notion of "holding" a negative, as it brought back memories of teaching an art history class, and the slide projector bulb blew (no spare as we were already using the spare), so I pulled the tray, continued the discussion and plassed slides back and forth among the students. In that instance, "holding" severely detracted from the experience.</p>

[matt_needham]

<p>Negs are precious. They are incredibly fragile, and I have no way of making an identical copy. I think of my negs very differently than my files, which I have backed up three times at home, and twice in other locations. When I realize my house is on fire, or the tornado sirens are going off, I have to haul armloads of Printfile binders out of danger. I can just let the computer burn. My digital photos are just as important to me, but they can easily be made disaster proof.</p>

<p> </p>

[patrick j dempsey]

<p>Jeez you guys completely ignored my POINT and focused on the non-point of grammar (oh yeah its a forum). The point is.... if a digital original can have 1000 copies on various hard-drives, so can a film original. And having 1000 copies doesn't mean a thing if you get caught with your pants down and all 1000 copies are on hard-drives that are melted at the bottom of of a pile of charcoal. Sure you can make a backup and take that to a safety deposit box but lets be honest... how many people who preach it really honestly do that? Or is it another one of those things you just haven't gotten to yet but totally plan to do next week? As far as negs being fragile. Grab a stack of negatives and a hard-drive. Drop leave both of them in your backyard for a week and let them rained on, the neighbors dog pee on them, whatever. At the end of that week tell me which ones you can still get images out of. </p>

<p>I've pulled 50-year-old negatives out of an abandoned house that were sitting next to the collapsed roof covered in show and rat feces. Aside from a few holes where bugs had eaten at them, they were perfectly stable, wonderfully detailed and yielded beautiful prints without any adjustment or compensation compared to B&W negatives shot just a few days before. Yes color negatives are fragile compared to that, but B&W will last for a long long time, even without taking very good care of them. Digital media also ages so not only do you need to keep those backups you need to keep backing up your old files to new media. I can't read a single floppy drive of my data from the early 90's... they are all corrupt. All those programs and digital images I created which were supposed to last in storage... poof. Multiple copies all suffered from the same aging process. All gone. Backup tapes? As expensive as they were, they still degrade and have to be re-backed up. And that doesn't even speak to the fact that it gets harder and harder to read these formats because the drives are simply not common anymore. And that's not just for magnetic media, we now know that CD's don't last forever either... and I don't mean scratching, they just degrade. When burnable CD's first became available many people started backing up to those.... and are now kicking themselves because the disks won't read.... but heck in 5 years we might not even see CD drives on computers anymore anyway. People like to say that vinyl records are fragile too... but a 60-year-old record can be washed in soapy water, flattened with heat and pressure and played on any record player made in the last 80 years.</p>

[mike dixon]

<p><em>Sure you can make a backup and take that to a safety deposit box but lets be honest... how many people who preach it really honestly do that?</em></p>

<p>No one. All the people in this thread who've described their methods of redundant backup in different locations were lying. In truth, we all just have a single copy of our files on 3.5-inch floppies stuck in a shoebox under the bed.</p>

<p>Since we've determined that film is the only truly safe medium and "digital heads" are ignorant liars, there's really no point in discussing the matter further.</p>