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June 15, 2006
[ SAVING THE PICTURE FOR POSTERITY ]
— OR AT LEAST FOR THE GRANDCHILDREN
The black curse of the 21st century has fallen on the house of dpexpert. We have a compact disc on which we have recorded pictures and documents -- the only copies, naturally -- that will not yield up its contents.
We have forked out real American dollars for software that promises to shake loose the information contained on any reluctant disc. Money wasted!
We have handed the disc over to experts who have laughed and promised to restore our files in a nonce, no worries mate! Nothing.
Which, let us tell you, sent a cold shiver down the dpexpert spine. We have image files stored on twenty-two CDs and one DVD and we are wondering just how long they will be accessible. We are pretty sure that our grandchildren won’t be looking through our disc albums in fifty years time, even in the unlikely event that they have access to an antique CD player.
How long will a home made CD or DVD last?
According to Herr Kurt Gerecke, IBM Deutschland’s expert on date storage, not long. Gerecke told the American magazine PC World that two years is about average for the life expectancy of a burned disc, and if you keep it in a dark cool place you might make it last for five. Not very reassuring.
Gerecke says that the burned disc has a short lifespan compared with a commercially pressed disc, which fits with our observation. We have compact discs bought from the shop on CD Day One in 1983 that are still perfect. On the other hand we have had DVDs give up the ghost in less than a year. So the bottom line is that optical discs look like a gamble.
Discs seem to be another of those consumables that obey the inexorable law of capitalism: You get what you pay for. The el-cheapo discs look attractive, but they won’t last. The more expensive brand name discs do better, but even paying that sort of money only buys five years.
The next big thing in optical writeable discs is Blue Ray, but even that must be seen as an interim medium between non-volatile memory on revolving discs and memory on solid state devices similar to camera memory cards or memory sticks. Samsung has announced a notebook computer with 32gb of flash memory and no rotating hard drive. That’s the future.
So perhaps all we need is five years of optical storage to tide us over.
If you’re both worried and serious then it might be worth looking into the Delkin eFilm Gold CD and DVD blanks. These discs promise a life expectancy of 100 years for the DVDs and 300 for the CDs. That should just about do the trick!
The longevity of these discs is attributed to the use of gold in the reflective layer of the disc, according to the Australian distributors, Baltronics. Gold is supposed to be impervious to the effects of temperature and humidity and therefore resistant to oxidation.
Given the impressive claims made for the Delkin discs they are not that expensive -- $1.72 for a single CD and $3.50 for a DVD. They are cheaper in bulk and more expensive with inkjet printable surface. They can be ordered from Photo Accessories, a Sydney supplier to commercial photographers.
Prints on paper are still the medium most likely to survive in the shoe box and be viewable by the grandchildren. Before investing in a photo inkjet printer it pays to check the Wilhelm Research web page (www.wilhelm-research.com) for the most recent longevity test results.
The superb Epson 2400 -- or any of the Epson rage that uses pigment inks (not dye inks) -- rates highly for life expectancy. Keep your Epson prints in an album or a box and, depending on the Epson paper used, the pictures will still be there in 200 years time and, in some cases, in 300.
Preliminary tests on the forthcoming Canon pigment ink printer show that colour prints will be in good order in 100 years time and monochrome prints even longer.
Pigment inks do not produce prints with the same resolution, colour range and snap as dye inks but the dye-based medium fades faster. Mind you, everything is relative. Canon claim that their brilliant dye-based ChromaLife100 inks used with certain of their papers will last 10 years “in air”, 30 years under glass and 100 years in archival conditions.
The moral of the story is that digital images might not be as ephemeral as once we feared.
*
Posted by terry at June 15, 2006 05:18 AM
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Comments
If you visit the eFilm website (wrongly spelled in The Age today) http://www.photo-accessories.com.au/ You will notice quite a difference in the prices:
10 for $28 = $2.80 each
16 for $54 = $3.38 each
25 for $48 = $1.92 each
just an observation
By the way I'm looking round for a camera. I have a Canon A70 and I find all the microscopic peculiar icons in the menu annoyingly confusing. Everytime I use it I have to be refering to the guide-book looking for sub-menus. I want a camera about 5 megapix that is more intuitive to use, that has a decent optical zoom, a view-finder, and is Black. Am I asking too much? What would you suggest. I want photography to be a joy rather than a pain. What's the Ricoh R4 like? Or the Sony Cybershot? Thanks - Ian
Posted by: Ian Duncanson at June 16, 2006 08:52 AM
Ian:
I regret that someone at The Age presumed to fiddle with my copy. I did have the URL for Photo Accessories absolutely correct, free of error and perfect! I suspect that editors do a search-and-destroy on all hyphens, replacing most of them with n dashes and eliminating those they don't like.
On the prices of discs: For some reason the printable discs are much much more expensive than the unprintable ones. The price per disc that I quoted in the article is for the conventional disc.
I'm not sure in what way you find the Canon icons confusing, so it's hard to know what to advise. There is no camera that is completely intuitive and able to be used without reference to the user manual, except when you set it to Auto and leave the camera to make all decisions.
Once you want to turn off the flash, go into Macro mode, change from Auto White Balance, reset the image size, alter the exposure value etc etc you are in the world of menus and icons. The Canon A70 is about as good as it gets in this department.
The new Sony DSC-W range is nice and there are some black models but the menus are no more self-explanatory than they are in the Canon. The Kodak V570 comes in black and is an excellent camera on which you can set all your preferred options once, save as Custom Mode and pretty well never have to worry about again.
The problem -- if it seems to be a problem -- is that there is far more user control over shooting parameters in a digital camera than in film. More choices is either liberating or confusing and tedious, depending on your point of view.
TL
Posted by: Terry at June 16, 2006 11:55 PM
Hi Terry,
What was the particular technical problem with the disc? You could post to the Bleeding Edge forum and we could have a chat about it. In terms of lifetime of optical discs, I'm not a pro photographer but I know how computer technology goes and it's not all good - the CDs and DVDs depend on dye layers - the gold in them helps maintain reflectivity and there are discs with additional plastic / lacquers to make them resistant to scratches. At the end of the day, a dye is a dye and if that dye breaks up due to exposure to heat and light, then it's gone. Also, there is the little phenomenon of layer eating fungus / microbes - I have an audio CD in which the reflective layer has fallen prey to humidity or such attack.
Flash memory has a finite lifetime measured in read/write cycles. I'm not sure whether prolonged irradiation from those airport x-rays can also kill it.
The best bet for the digital world is to make make copies and lots of them. A strategy is to keep the stuff on hard disk, then archive the complete collection (which is thus growing in size) every month (or more) so that you have several sets of disks during the year. Discs are AUD .30 - ok, they are cheap but you're only expecting them to survive for a few months before a complete new set replaces them. It's better to do that then to pay through the nose for one disc costing $3.00 and pray that this single disc will last 10x longer.
Posted by: Ananda Sim at June 18, 2006 09:31 AM
Ref Terry's piece in June 25 Green Guide.
Web address given for Photo Accessories is incorrect, although link via on-line version of 'DP Expert' is correct.
Hyphen between 'photo' and 'accessories' has been omitted in Green Guide version.
PS Enjoy the column(s) very much.
It is so nice to receive regular confirmation of my prejudices!
Cheers
Max
Posted by: Max Robinson at June 19, 2006 12:33 AM
About the 300 year lifetime CD's.
It's kind of hard to imagine that anyone will be able to read a CD in 300 years, & none of us will be around to see if these ones still work! I haven't had any CD-R's fail, but I do have some audio CD's from the '80's that have the coatings peeling off, they still work though.
I think the problem of long term storage of digital photos is not yet fully appreciated by most people, so I enjoyed this article.
BTW I still use & like film!
Cheers,
Geoff.
Posted by: GSB at June 22, 2006 05:44 AM
BILL WRITES: "In my small publishing business I regularly archive onto CD all the files I wish to retain on any completed job. Just over two years ago I did a complete recheck of all these CDs to ensure they were still viable; I found four (but not, interestingly, the two oldest which were then and still are completely readable) that I could not read with the computer I had then. These four I was able to open on an older computer and by transferring the contents to my current computer was able to re-record them. After reading your article I decided to check all my archive CDs recorded before 2000, and all can be read by my current computer, an 800mb Macintosh G4 Tower. Of course on all the CDs there is the odd file that can't be recognised by any of my current version software.
"In summary, then, the problems I have encountered so far have been not of the CD itself deteriorating but being unreadable because of being burnt with old generation, superseded software, or individual files which are unreadable by any current software. To cover this to some degree I'm hanging on to one of my older computers.
"Incidentally, if you haven't yet tried this I suggest you try to read your unreadable CD on a Macintosh. You never know, it might do the trick!"
Posted by: Terry at June 22, 2006 09:39 AM
I've been researching extensively for archive quality DVD media and from all accounts, the Taiyo Yuden brand has a consistent reputation for quality and longevity.
See:
http://www.cdr-zone.com/articles/recordable_dvd_quality_page_1.html
Posted by: Dana at June 24, 2006 06:16 PM
Yes, Taiyo Yuden are top quality, and for the price, they are more than reasonable given the fact that you dont want valuable memories dissappearing with cheap media
Posted by: Mike Lewin at July 14, 2006 11:37 PM