Re: preservation of negatives/slides/prints
Diana, In regards to the issue of to scan or not to scan, here's something you may want to consider. The tricky thing about digital storage, as you alluded to, is that standardized formats are constantly changing. It's only a matter of time until the CD/DVD is replaced by bigger and better things. If you don't stay on top of the new technologies and periodically migrate all of your data to the new media standard, there will be a point where you won't be able to access any of it. When the Zip drive faded into obscurity a few years ago, a professor in our English department contracted me to migrate all of her files from the last 7 years to CDs (took several days). Now that the 3.5" floppy drive is slowly being phased out by major computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, everyone that's had data on floppy disks now has to move it all to a hard drive or CD/DVD. With this in mind, I agree with Gawain. If you're not planning to do anything with these images in the near future, it may not be worth scanning all of them right away. On the other hand, if the negatives are in fairly bad shape, you might want to scan them before the quality degrades too much. Camden Hardy camden[at]hardyphotography[dot]net http://www.hardyphotography.net
|