Epson V600 - Ready for upgrade

grat · Aug 10, 2021

Old Gregg said:
People assume that computer technologies get obsolete quickly. In fact what happens is that once a technology crosses a certain popularity threshold it never gets obsolete. Never. In fact, that is a much bigger problem. The web browser you are reading this on is pretending to be a printer that is connected to a computer in a data center.

I've got a couple of 5.25" disks I'd like you to read........ or some old audio cassettes that store data from my 1980's vintage TRS-80.

Although-- I have TIFF and PNG files (and some PSD files) from the late 1990's that are still perfectly usable, so in that sense, you're right. As long as it's not a terribly proprietary file like CR3, it should be legible.

Foto Ludens · Aug 10, 2021

I just think that it's a tad optimistic to assume that technology we use today will still be easily usable in the future. Tiff files will work, unless computers/phones/whatever we end up using in 20 years have diverged so much from current ones that they won't load anymore. And sure, a lot of old code gets migrated into new code -- until it doesn't, for whatever unforeseen reason.

My apologies if the tone of my post came across as antagonistic. That was not at all the intention.

Alan Edward Klein · Aug 11, 2021

Some of my 15-20 year old DVD and CD's, even the gold labelled archival ones, don't work anymore. They won't load. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. Oh well.

tehabe · Aug 11, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
Some of my 15-20 year old DVD and CD's, even the gold labelled archival ones, don't work anymore. They won't load. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. Oh well.

Digital data will only be kept alive when it is copied and copied and copied. Otherwise it will vanish into unreadable disks and discs and chips.

Alan Edward Klein · Aug 11, 2021

tehabe said:
Digital data will only be kept alive when it is copied and copied and copied. Otherwise it will vanish into unreadable disks and discs and chips.

I backup data now on a Western Digital My Passport hard disc. Every couple of years I store the existing one and installed a new one so I have more than one disc. Is that safe?

Adrian Bacon · Aug 11, 2021

Foto Ludens said:
You are making a huge assumption about the forwards compatibility of your digital files. Ideally computers decades from now will be able to open them, but we cannot/do not know that they will.

This is why you save in a format that has freely available documentation and/or is in the public domain. TIFF/DNG files will be openable for quite some time and I'd be shocked if they ever fall off the table. Even if they do, I have documentation for their internal format on hand and can write code to do it. Much of the whole "can't read it in 50 years" sentiment is valid, but mainly because of the many proprietary formats that manufacturers use in an attempt to lock their users in. If you get out of that and store your data in a format that is publicly documented, the likelihood that you'll ever run into that is extremely low. Believe it or not, you can store and represent just about most things in a publicly available format.

Adrian Bacon · Aug 11, 2021

grat said:
I've got a couple of 5.25" disks I'd like you to read........ or some old audio cassettes that store data from my 1980's vintage TRS-80.

Although-- I have TIFF and PNG files (and some PSD files) from the late 1990's that are still perfectly usable, so in that sense, you're right. As long as it's not a terribly proprietary file like CR3, it should be legible.

Lets not confuse physical media format with data file format.

tehabe · Aug 11, 2021

As long as there are projects like dcraw or LibRaw, I'm not too worried but choosing a camera which can produce DNG files is a plus. But I thought this was about the V600 scanner.

grat · Aug 11, 2021

Adrian Bacon said:
Lets not confuse physical media format with data file format.

However, even as others have mentioned, DVD's and CD's, especially recordable ones, have a limited shelf life. Those floppies from the 1980's are probably more readable than a DVD-RW from 1999-- except even if you have a 3.5" floppy, and a 3.5" floppy drive, unless they're from the same ecosystem, they're unlikely to be compatible.

I've been very good at migrating my data from one hard drive to another over the past 25 years-- many people aren't. As a result, physical media becomes important.

tehabe · Aug 11, 2021

grat said:
However, even as others have mentioned, DVD's and CD's, especially recordable ones, have a limited shelf life. Those floppies from the 1980's are probably more readable than a DVD-RW from 1999-- except even if you have a 3.5" floppy, and a 3.5" floppy drive, unless they're from the same ecosystem, they're unlikely to be compatible.

There are those M-Discs, which claim in their marketing to stay safe for 1000 years, which is hard to proof of course.

Auer · Aug 11, 2021

35mm, Silverfast 8, V600, 2400dpi.

City Frame-31 by Eric Auer, on Flickr

City Frame-32 by Eric Auer, on Flickr

fs999 · Aug 16, 2021

I moved from an old V500 to Plustek OpticFilm 120 which works well from 135 to 6x12 with Silverfast Studio 9 and all my films are scanned flat !

Epson V600 - Ready for upgrade

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