Archival qualities of RA-4 process

DREW WILEY · Nov 15, 2011

Even with pigment prints a lot of the "archival" issues are not with the pigments per se, but with the
long-term integrity of the sandwich. Kinda like what will happen first with house paint - will it blister
and peel before it fades?? Color carbro prints seem to develop such issues. I never personally cared for the look of pigment prints derived from halftone processes (looked too much like offset printing), but some of the handmade ones can be magnificent. But I'm extremely suspcious of any claims of
a C-print staying clean for two hundred years; and the whole extrapolated "accelerated aging" of
current inkjet work again fails to take into account the long-term integrity of the pigment/substrate
bond. At least with Cibachrome, we have a number of decades of actual history, as well as a feel
for how improved C-prints like CA will perform. Just too many variables out there.

Photo Engineer · Nov 15, 2011

Wilhelm's tests are "extrapolated" as well and are just as valid or invalid as any other extrapolated test.

What I have found and what I said earlier is that prints often vary in keeping qualities based on the printer who made the print. Therefore, it is useful to test your own prints from your own process to avoid issues such as water hardness, pigment batch and etc. I cannot begin to express the difficulty of this type of test because you will even find vast differences based on latitude, climate and pollution.

All I can suggest is to run tests that force fade prints, and this involves light, heat, humidity and time as the base items to include in the test procedure.

PE

holmburgers · Nov 15, 2011

Michael R 1974 said:
I hate to say this but wouldn't digital be the way to go if this is your goal?

Yes and no. Are we going to go through our grandma's hard-drive the same way we got through her old shoe-boxes? I don't know...

But I'm specifically thinking about an object that can simply be found. Digital information will likely have to be accessed, and that's a totally different thing; particularly from the archaeology viewpoint.

DREW WILEY · Nov 16, 2011

Michael - it would probably be about realistic as cloning dinosaur DNA ala Jurassic Park. Just think -
millions of dollars spent on R&D just so someone can read nearly decomposed discs of Aunt Maud's
vacation pictures in Peoria!

DREW WILEY · Nov 16, 2011

To be even more cynical : a big line forms at Antiques Roadshow. Everyone is carrying a box full of
old discs, and the appraiser tells them to empty the box into a recycle bin so that they can see if the box itself is collectable. At least the price of skeet shooting will go way down.

Photo Engineer · Nov 18, 2011

Magnetically recorded data deteriorates with time as the medium loses its field strength. DVD and CD media will deteriorate with time as the plastic decays and most importantly, the format of all disks changes with time. I have DVDs with 3 different formats and one format cannot be read at all anymore. I have magnetic disks that cannot be read due to format changes.

A major portion of the budget of the motion picture archiving industry at the present time is storing and backing up digital motion pictures. They estimate that digital storage costs in the range of 100 or more times that for storing analog equivalents.

Lets not turn this into a digital rant. I just wanted to set the record straight.

PE

holmburgers · Nov 18, 2011

Michael, honestly I think you're right for the most part. As Umut alluded to, the only really sure-fire way to preserve something ad infinitum is propagation. Multiple copies in multiple hands. At some point it would become more of a challenge to destroy it than preserve it.

Man, I guess Blue Jeh had no idea what a can of worms he opened up...

Tom Taylor · Nov 18, 2011

Photo Engineer said:
Magnetically recorded data deteriorates with time as the medium loses its field strength...

It is well known that the earth's magnetic field had reversed polarity several times in the past. I wonder what effect such a reversal would have on data stored magnetically? :confused:

Thomas

anikin · Nov 18, 2011

One well-known and well-kept secret of IT is that there is currently no reliable long-term (>10 years) backup system. The CD/DVD recordables last on average about 7 years or less and after that they are mainly unreadable because of the accumulated errors. Magnetic media is about the same. State-of-the-art method of data preservation is massively replicated storage on hard-drives that is repeatedly rewritten. However, remember that hard drives have 1-4% fatal failure rate per year. And that does not count random sector errors which are masked by complicated algorithms in the drive firmware. I would not rely on that to last for millenia.

If you don't read and rewrite your backups every few years or so, you are guaranteed to lose them. The main problem is, there is currently NO passive storage mechanism. The only way to keep digital data alive is by actively replicating and copying data over and over. If you get a 5-7 year long war or natural disaster which creates energy interruptions then most of your digital data becomes unrecoverable.

In my opinion, if you want your pictures to last 200 years, stick to analogue or make sure that Coke prints it on every can they produce - that is more likely to survive though millenia by simple matter of numbers ;-)

Michael R 1974 said:
PE, if we disregard magnetic storage, your point seems for the most part to revolve around the decay of the storage medium, not the data itself. With respect to format, I'm assuming of course that there is a desire in the future to read this data, in which case it would be pretty simple for someone to make a suitable read-down device. True we currently have outdated formats which cannot be read anymore by mass-consumer devices, but surely the data can be read somehow.

Geez I can't believe I'm even commenting on this topic

Photo Engineer · Nov 18, 2011

Michael R 1974 said:
PE, if we disregard magnetic storage, your point seems for the most part to revolve around the decay of the storage medium, not the data itself. With respect to format, I'm assuming of course that there is a desire in the future to read this data, in which case it would be pretty simple for someone to make a suitable read-down device. True we currently have outdated formats which cannot be read anymore by mass-consumer devices, but surely the data can be read somehow.

Geez I can't believe I'm even commenting on this topic

Anikin says it well in his post.

No digital storage medium lasts as long as analog, and that seems to include digital prints.

And if you believe that formats of the past can be read in the future, I have some Apple ][ floppy disks I need read! Game to try? It is so hardware dependent that you would have to re-create the Apple disk and controller card. BTDT. I wrote software to read and write 8" double sided diskettes in 3 formats and Apple format. Same thing for the early Macintosh. They used variable speed drives based on Track #.

PE

pentaxuser · Nov 18, 2011

Picture the scene: Technology arrived early in the late Egyptian period and some farsighted Greek scholar left the contents of the Rosetta stone on a 5 inch floppy instead of a stone.

We might still be wondering what these primitive cartoons on the tomb walls actually said

pentaxuser

bluejeh · Nov 18, 2011

"Man, I guess Blue Jeh had no idea what a can of worms he opened up... Holmburgers"

The discussin has been enlightening, confirms why I am learning analogue printing.

M. Lointain · Nov 19, 2011

With regards to analogue vs. digital storage- we live in a mostly digital world now which means anything analogue is generally converted to digital. My only concern with digital, since I have everything stored in the original analogue format, is losing the work it took to make the 25,000ish scans I have stored. I do not want to do all of those scans again!

Digital storage is a seriously underestimated problem IMO, but what do I know. Most young children these days will grow old without having evidence of what they looked like as kids. Think about it. At least our generation has some faded pictures. I tell everyone in my family to get all of their important images printed, and to do it through someone like Aspen Creek (i.e. analogue) so the prints will be around in 50 years.

Rudeofus · Nov 20, 2011

anikin said:
One well-known and well-kept secret of IT is that there is currently no reliable long-term (>10 years) backup system.

Phhht. Backups ....

Linus Torvalds said:
(Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it

holmburgers · Nov 21, 2011

What's interesting is to think about the role of social sites like Facebook in all of this. They're literally becoming the keepers of our photo albums. From that perspective, it's actually somewhat reassuring.

It's really interesting what is happening, that's for certain.

Rudeofus · Nov 21, 2011

holmburgers said:
What's interesting is to think about the role of social sites like Facebook in all of this. They're literally becoming the keepers of our photo albums.

They may, or they may not. What happens if Facebook closes shop? Or just deletes your account because they don't like you? It's a single point of failure FWIW.

It's kind of funny that cloud computing, strictly enforced copyrights and digital rights management make it almost certain that some work will not be viewable 1000 years from now.

EdSawyer · Nov 21, 2011

PE, what is on the Apple ][ disks? programs or just data? Most programs are available as semi-freeware from various Apple ][ emulator sites.

Do you still have an Apple ][ ? (I do) If so, are the disks readable in an apple ][ with a disk ][ drive?

Apple 2 hardware is pretty cheap and easy to come by, and still works fairly well, overall. how the disks were stored is really the key... There are even methods for reading in stuff from Apple 2 disks, and copying to modern hardware (mac for example), or also interfacing a hard drive to the Apple 2.

Apple ][ never used 8" disks natively, so interfacing an 8" drive to an apple 2 must have been an interesting challenge. ;-) The apple 2 drives used a constant speed (300rpm) so those were a little simpler than the mac 3.5" drive, probably.

Photo Engineer said:
And if you believe that formats of the past can be read in the future, I have some Apple ][ floppy disks I need read! Game to try? It is so hardware dependent that you would have to re-create the Apple disk and controller card. BTDT. I wrote software to read and write 8" double sided diskettes in 3 formats and Apple format. Same thing for the early Macintosh. They used variable speed drives based on Track #.

PE

Photo Engineer · Nov 21, 2011

Ed;

I have an Apple ][, a /// and an early Mac. I have 8" drives for the first two and a HD for the ///. I wrote my own software in Assembly and still have copies of the source code on disk and as printout. Almost everything I have on disk is my own creation. I used to write and sell Apple software, and teach courses at night in hardware and software applications. Most of that is now unusable and certainly out of date and that is the only relevant point here in this thread. All digital goes the way of the dinosaur and IMHO is so technically complex that it is too hard - nearly useless in most cases, to try and duplicate.

Today's sound boards are so much more effective as are current graphics. Why import old Apple stuff. I have early Kodak digital photos that are quite nice but nearly useless. Same thing!

PE

EdSawyer · Nov 21, 2011

Nice score on the ///, those are somewhat rare (at least in working form). 8" drives seem like an odd choice for those unless you already had them at the time? I never wrote much in assembly if I could help it, it was just above my level @ the time. I did hack quite a bit of things using assembly though. ;-) What software did you sell back then? I was a huge apple ][ fanatic back in the day also, though I didnt' sell software, but I did write quite a bit which I just gave away (open source).

I hear you re: old vs. new and whether it's worth the trouble. I sometimes like to look through my old source code from 30+ years ago and see what I was thinking at the time, as far as logic, and comments in the code, etc. Interesting, sometimes... almost like a journal in a way.

I bet I could still pull stuff old 5.25" apple floppies if I had to, if the disks themselves were not self-corrupted or damaged. now, whether I would want or need to is another story. ;-) 20+ years from now, maybe not so doable. But today it's not too far from that era to conceive of it.

still, ultimately I agree, I prefer analog for things of a photographic nature. ( and Musical nature too, most of the time.)

-Ed

Photo Engineer · Nov 21, 2011

I wrote software for a company on the west coast that now no longer exists. I wrote 8" disk drivers for their card, stereo music drivers for another card and some demo software. It was fun, but I would not want to do it again. The Apple ][ stuff was easier to work with than the /// stuff. The /// was a closed system pretty much. The early Mac was a "mess"!!!!! And the 68000 chip was hard to use. We used it at EK early on along with the 6809 for process control. Kodak build a process control computer called the LLM (Lousy Little Machine!). I worked with that in the early 80s along with a 6809 card for the Apple ][.

Now Ed, back to the main topic.

PE

nworth · Nov 21, 2011

Digital print media have some decided advantages, and we can only hope that the R&D required to make them as permanent as real photographs is pursued vigorously and successfully. I recently noticed that a digital print had sold at auction for US$4.3M. I wish the buyer luck. As for digital storage, we indeed have a major problem. The media change frequently and rapidly and the content deteriorates, as noted above. My digital image backups are CDs and DVD. I can mostly still read them - even those over 10 years old - but not always. Magnetic media are usually gone in 5 to 7 years, although (with persistence) you can sometimes read older stuff. If the hardware and sufficient documentation is available, you can write a driver that will read older data formats, although it is moderate torture to do so. But you can't read data that isn't there. A sometimes worse problem is the constantly changing interface "standards". You very often can not find the interface hardware to connect an old piece of equipment (like 8" floppies) to the computer. Building such things is possible, but both expensive and difficult.

brucemuir · Nov 21, 2011

^ exactly, like firewire going the way of the dodo...

EdSawyer · Nov 22, 2011

PE, thanks for the info on the old Apple stuff. Fun to reminisce on that. Those were simpler days, and more fun I think, as far as computing goes. I miss that era.

DREW WILEY · Nov 22, 2011

I can only imagine how this conversation would have transpired forty years ago, discussing how
archival punch cards are, and what a wonderful invention Fortran was. Somebody would have probably even figured out a way to punch a card into a visual pattern and spray paint through it.

holmburgers · Nov 22, 2011

Those punch cards are pretty archival as a matter of fact. Most of the photo books I check out have them perfectly preserved in a little envelope on the back cover!

Archival qualities of RA-4 process

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency