Comments on: Kodachrome Requiem

By: Charles Andres

Charles Andres — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:51:03 +0000

I vote for holgraphic binary storage in plexiglas with a laser to read them following some very easy to program reading capability. But this can be substituted for any physical substance that records data for extremely long periods of time, even if that is india ink bar codes on silk parchment stored in an inert gas. The software to read the codes and translate them to RGB alpha and ASCII will also be included in several popular languages a la Rosetta Stone.

Of course, some editing will be required. But with collaboration, the work would at least be all original. Extremely important images and text would be preserved in duplicate copies.

Then again, how much of the 21st century, the first all-digital one, will be around for the 29th? the 99th? the 9999th? Certainly, some of it should survive for its anachronistic wonder.

By: Richard Knoppow

Richard Knoppow — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:14:42 +0000

This is in a way a chicken or egg question, namely, how much did Kodachrome sales fall off before Kodak began to make processing more difficult to obtain? Historically, Kodak seems to have been trying to kill off Kodachrome ever
since the announcement of Ektachrome c.1946. In fact, they did discontinue Kodachrome in sheet film sizes at that time much to the disgust of commercial photographers. While Ektachrome did not have to be sent to Rochester for
processing it was inferior to Kodachrome in many ways.

There is also a question in my mind about Kodak’s promotion and sales policies in general. I think these may have had a seriously deleterious effect on sales of all photographic especially with the increasing competition that began about the 1960s.

Perhaps Kodak or Fuji can come up with incorporated coupler color films that have better lifetimes. However, note that its the dark storage time which is so much longer for Kodachrome, its fading resistance under projection is
worse than incorporated coupler reversal films. I have no idea why.

By: Gordon E. Peterson II

Gordon E. Peterson II — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:08:30 +0000

The issue of durability of cultural media is of extreme concern, especially to librarians who are not unfamiliar with books, some published more than 500 years ago, which can still be paged through (carefully) and read today.

It’s one thing to just point out that we COULD migrate recordings to new physical support media, but quite another to realize how massive that job becomes as the amount of recorded data mushrooms.

I’ve got physical disk cartridges, punched cards, magnetic tapes, and so forth less than forty years old, where already it’s not clear that I would ever be able to read the data from those media again.

The same kinds of concerns apply to various video formats (U-matic, Beta, Technicolor, RCA CED, laserdiscs, and so forth). When the last player for that format quits working, media recorded in that format become all but unrecoverable.

Even color photographic prints and slides have problems with color fading and shifting… and that’s over relatively short timeframes.

Other than preservationists and archivists busying themselves maintaining and updating formats, to maintain these collections (and on a constantly ballooning media collection!), I’m not sure that there is a good solution to these problems.