Archivability of Negs, Chromes vs Digital

I have a couple of questions and I apologise in advance if these have doubled up in the forum.

1) What is the archivability (life length) like for negs & chromes post dev?

2) Best storage solutions? (I'm in southern Australia where in summer our temperatures can be up to mid 40 degree celcius. Poor people up north where it's hotter and even more humid)

3) Pros and cons of film storage vs digital storage and digital life?

Sorry, a lot here, but any comments on any of these would be most appreciated.

Kind regards
Nicole

I haven't worked much with old slides, but I have worked with old negs from my family archive. Even poorly stored 60 year old negs still make good prints. What camera, developer, lab, etc Gramps used doesn't matter one bit. All I have to do is slap the neg in my enlarger and I can make a print.

Although I haven't made prints from glass plates I've read that people are still pulling good prints from plates exposed pre-1900.

The chances of still be able to access the CD you left in the bottom of a drawer 40 years ago are probably fairly slim. The chances of your grandchildren being able to access that CD are even slimmer.

Thanks Ian. It's the CD's that worries me! I have shot some important stuff digitally and archived on CD but have converted back to film for longevity and quality! Thanks so much for your input.

Nicole McGrade said:

Thanks Ian. It's the CD's that worries me! I have shot some important stuff digitally and archived on CD but have converted back to film for longevity and quality! Thanks so much for your input.

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A couple choices depending on how organized you are

1) make multiple CD backups. Update them every five years, upgrade to DVD when necessary, upgrade to whatevers next after that.

2) Same thing but use hard drives instead.

3) Burn the really important images to film, store safely and don't worry about them any more after that.

ian_greant said:

A couple choices depending on how organized you are

3) Burn the really important images to film, store safely and don't worry about them any more after that.

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I like this one. How easy is it to 'burn to film'? Never knew it could be done.

yes, i would like to know how to "burn" an image to film.

ann said:

yes, i would like to know how to "burn" an image to film.

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Ann,
In the 80's through about the end of the 90's there was a very strong and evolving electronics business that focused on projecting digital images onto photosensitive films.

There are many that are still around. I have used three:
Solitairs are the most common these come in 8k and 16k flavours and can image to 35mm, 70mm, 4x5 and 8x10. The 16k are the best of the solitairs.

LVT's the one I used was able to image to 4x5 or 8x10. It had a res60 and 80 (60 or 80lpmm) and was slightly better than the solitaire at about 2-3x the cost with considerably less versatility.

Lightjets These were considered the cream of the crop. Although they had the same resolution as LVT's the imaging device (3 lasers) was considered far superior -- and they were in my experience. Lightjets, or at least those I'm familiar with could image to 4x5, 5x7, 8x10 and 11x14.

Many are still out there. I have a freind who bought an older Lightjet on ebay for 400.00USD (new these things went as high as 350k) and I have access to a solitaire 16.

They were popular because there were no viable quality alternatives for digital print output. They were also big with the CGI movie industry.

You should be able to finda lab that still has one of these. PM me if you need any help.

They can produce beautifull neg's and tranies with some limits as to films.