Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/04/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The funny thing about "the end of film" is that there is almost no way to make an image that will last 200 years other than to record it on film or paper. I can imagine a future in which photography is digital, but images are stored on film. They would be stored not as images, but as digital signals; if you put the film in an enlarger what you would see would not be the image, but odd geometric patterns that encoded the zeroes and ones that represented the image. This would be black-and-white film, of course; color film is not stable enough. No current digital medium is known to last more than 25 years. People suspect that CD Roms will, but no one knows. But we know film lasts 100 years, because we have 100-year-old film that still holds its information.