Would you accept a roll of Kodachrome as payment instead????

It depends if Jim want's to try to develop kodachrome in is bath tube or not.

Well, at least he can dev as a B&W film!

'Kodachrome' Beer will do nicely :DL

How about I send you a Czech instead. :O:

A Czech? Can't speak for anyone else, but Iran as far away from that as I could.

The only thing I lament about the death of film is the lack of permanence inherent to digital imagery. I read somewhere that it is estimated that in 50 years there will be more pictures surviving from the Civil War than there will be from those taken today. I don't know how true that is but a hard drive crash or even a single errant mouse click and the digital image is gone whereas film prints and negatives are much more durable.

Too true! but the upshot is that more photos are been taken, but less are developed.

Properly maintained, a chemical picture can last hundreds of years. The lifespan of a CD or DVD is considerably less.

Film still remains the most efficient way to store that type of data for a long time and in little space. :yeah:

In a way one could say that the internet is partially responsible for this. As e-commerce evolved and people started doing and getting used to 1-click shopping they began to expect things to happen faster - they developed a need/dependence on instant gratification.

Film takes time to properly develop (even if you're not doing anything special) where the digital camera's you have within seconds. Its to the point now that people are willing to wait even a hour to get their film developed.

So what would be the most efficient and long lasting digital image storage method?

Hard disk or Flash drive?

I've heard 50 years for a HDD but the only thing i can find about flash drives is number of write/erase rounds. Nothing about using it as a long term storage device.

How long lasting would you want them to be?

Frequent backups to an external HD (or two -with one stored off-site) seems the best compromise to me. Flash-drive, HD, optical disk, tape; they're all going to fail at some point, it's just a matter of staying on top of the backups and having redundant copies - and hoping that all the copies don't go south at the same time.

As long as possible. What is possible?

Sounds like a lot of work. With good environmental controls what would be the best if left undisturbed?

At this time, digital media can be stored for as long as there is someone willing to actively maintain it - transfer the data to new media as the old media degrades or becomes obsolete - recode the files to newer formats as the old ones become unreadable. Active maintenance is the key, more so than the particular media used.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn't. Plug HD/Flash-drive into computer, start backup program, go to bed, next day take backup drive to work/friends/moms for storage. Repeat annually, or as needed.

Things may/should be much better in 10 years.

As to what will last the longest - no one really knows.

Really depends on the type of memory. There are types of memory that need to be refreshed every few minutes/seconds/whatever(look for DRAM), and there are types of memory that can theoretically keep their information indefinitely. Some of those need a constant power supply (SRAM) whereas others such as a hard disk or flash memory should keep their stored information pretty much forever. (Flash memory deteriorates with every time it's rewritten, which means that after a certain amount of writes (in the order of tens of thousands) it becomes unusable. Which is why flash is only used in applications where only few write operations are needed, like mp3-players)