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Anonymous
>>209331 The argument can be made two ways. One is that film will eventually degrade and bytes will always be bytes. The other is that film, particularly B&W negative and color transparency, are archive stable for hundreds of years and require only an eye to view, whereas digital files are subject to format obsolescence (particularly a concern with camera raw files), CD/DVD degradation (which has been shown to happen in as little as 3-5 years), file corruption, and hard disk failure. As I said to myself the first time I lost a bunch of raw files to an HD failure (about 500 shots, from two days of shooting, that I hadn't gotten around to backing up yet) "at least my slides never crashed."
I personally feel that it's a toss-up either way. The most secure method would definitely be digital, in a common and standard format like TIFF, backed up on multiple types of media and archived in multiple physical locations, and regularly updated to avoid breakdown of the physical recording media. Of course the vast majority of people are going to just stick their digital photos on a hard drive and probably won't even bother with a single backup DVD.
I still shoot mostly film, but not because I have anything particularly against digital. I usually use either 4x5 or 35mm with a Leica M3. I like the look of color slide films and find it to be a pain to reproduce it digitally, and I don't particularly like using current DSLRs. I've thought about the Epson R-D1, but really wish there were a version with an updated sensor. If there were one with a current generation 10-15mp sensor that sold for less than $2500, I would buy it.
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