Archiving Film and Digital

I was recently reading an article on the archival difference between film and digital photographs. The story slant was why it is better to shoot film rather than digital.

The author made the point that " Flash memory cards and hard drives may lose data after ten or twenty years of use, and everyone knows they are susceptible to failures and other problems. Data recovery systems have vastly improved, but when you risk losing the original digital negative, it can be frightening".

This statement is partially true, since everyone does know that hard drives and flash memory cards are susceptible to failures and other problems. But no one is likely to use a hard drive for twenty or even ten years. In addition, it is extremely unlikely that anyone will need to recover data from a hard drive that has been sitting in the garage for fifteen years.

Why is this so unlikely? Because computer users, as a general rule, tend to periodically upgrade their computer systems and those new systems come with bigger, faster, and supposedly more reliable than before hard drives. Oddly, no one asks for smaller hard drives with a new computer, regardless of what year it is. The repeating upgrades are part of a vicious cycle.

When a user upgrades, all the important files are transferred to the new, bigger hard drive. In short order they start using programs that take advantage of the new technology platform to create bigger files. They back up on whatever media makes sense at the time, a progression of events that brought them from 5.25" floppy drives to one and two terrabyte drives, so far. None of the important data is left behind. If you forgot to bring along that 1 megapixel photo of aunt Margaret's shoe when you upgraded to a machine running Windows XP, it probably wasn't important.

Of course the downcurve of the cycle is when the computer no longer measures up to the current operating system, and can't take advantage of the new whiz-bang applications that run only on the new operating system/hardware. Then its time to upgrade again. And transfer your files to the new system with the huge new storage capacity.

So the files aren't lost. You just won't have your "original digital negative". So what? By definition, a copy of a digital file is the same as the "original". It doesn't matter if it is originally stored on a machine running Windows 3.0, then transferred through a succession of years, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs, and eight hard drives to end up stored on the current Windows 7 machine. You still have the original. Barring a general collapse of world civilization, your great grandchildren will be able to look at your images in a hundred years, just like properly archived film.

Film Versus Digital is a "controversy" that breeds Web stories, print magazine articles, and blog posts like this one. But there is no controversy. Its made up. Film and digital are two very different processes. There is no winner or loser, just two different avenues of approach to photography.

It's like comparing hammers to lasers. Both will eventually reduce a boulder to a pile of pea gravel, but are used in different ways which result in the same end product, thousands of pieces of pea gravel.

One-Hour Film Processing

I recently went analog, shooting 60 frames of Real RAW. Yep, you guessed it: Film. The motivation was to go full frame 35mm. To read a comparison of film and digital photography, see http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm. Since receiving my first digital camera as a gift from my wife Lisa at the dawn of the digital age a decade ago (at least when the cameras became somewhat less than impossibly expensive), I’ve shot film a few times. But getting it processed has become progressively more risky with local one-hour labs. So I made a rather frivolous and admittedly subjective test with a couple types of print film; Kodak 200 and Fuji Superia Reala 100. I expected bad results and I wasn’t disappointed. But I didn’t expect that the Superia Reala would be the loser in the comparison, though it had nothing to do with the quality of the film. The photos shown here are all of the Superia Reala, and a good demonstration of why one should avoid one-hour processing “labs”. Click on the photos to view the larger image. You will see the processing defects.
The Kodak 200 is a standard consumer film. It’s for taking a picture of Aunt Amy and vacation snapshots. I took it to a one-hour Kodak processor. It turned out the way I expected. The negatives look sharp. But the prints are fuzzy and the color is slightly washed out. There were no scratches or dust on the negatives, however. The Kodak Machine was apparently clean.
The Superia Reala is an elegant, more expensive film. I bought it at a well-known chain photo outlet out of the refrigerator and took it back for processing to the same place, which uses Fuji chemicals and machinery. The color rendering of the Reala is more to my liking than the Kodak, which is just personal taste. The color prints were a hint over saturated for my eye, though not quite as fuzzy versus the negatives. The first photo above was the best example of the roll, since it had numerous pieces of dust incorporated into the image during the processing, in addition to the apparently standard scratch that spanned all the frames of the roll. I also looked at the film with my loupe and the images are sharp. The processing machine needs to cleaned, but keep in mind that these one-hour outlets are set up for volume and any machine maintenance panics the clerks.
In the 90s it was almost safe to have a local processor produce prints, but those years are only visible distantly now and in the rear-view mirror. The unserviced Fuji has put me off the local processors. I’m going to try using a pro lab, and do it by mail, since the best reviews I can find point to a place seventy some miles away. Oddly, the pro lab is very competitive in it’s pricing, and the basic digital scanning produces an image close to the resolution of my Nikon D200.