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Originally Posted by Beeman
He told me that the prints made from your digital camera will be good quality now but will deteriorate in 5-10 years. One thing he also said was to remember that there are no negatives and no permanent record unless you burn the pictures to CD.
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This may be true for prints made on your garden variety home printers, but if you have prints made at a professional lab it most certainly isn't the case. In some instances, the prints are made on the same paper and are processed in the same manner as traditional photographic negatives. Instead of light being passed through the negative onto continuous tone photo paper, your digital image is projected onto the paper and then processed. In other cases, the printers use dyes that MAY be more stable than traditional photographic prints.
Color photographic prints and negatives do not have what most would consider archival storage capabilities - at least not without a significant effort and expense. Do you have any color photos around from say 25 - 30 years ago? If so, the odds are that the colors have started to shift to have a red tint to them. Even prints from pro labs have the same problems unless measures are taken to slow the degradation of the photographic emulsion. Photographic print color, in any form, is ephemeral.
As for not having a negative, what is the difference between storing a box full of negatives and storing a CD of DVD? To me, it is far easier to store a dozen or so DVD/CDs that it is hundreds of rolls worth of negatives. Plus, with digital, you only keep the images that you want. The blurred shots, ones with heads or feet cut off, underexposed ones, etc. can be deleted and only the keepers go on the CD. With negatives you keep everything - the good, the bad and the ugly. I know that many will argue about file formats becoming obsolete, but to me that argument is a moot. Just store in any raw pixel file format and you will be able to convert them for the rest of your lifetime. With reasonable care, raw files on CDs or DVDs are far easier to store for the average user than negatives.
The simple truth is that high end consumer digitals have made 35mm and smaller photographics formats obsolete already - and the big photo companies know it. High end professional digitals are starting to make inroads into the hallowed ground of medium format. I say that very reluctantly - trust me. I have been shooting with my Bronica S2A for years and hate to see it go away, but the simple fact is that reasonably priced digicams in the 8 - 10 MP range will probably supplant it in the next 5 - 8 years. My only film cameras in the long run will probably be my view cameras. Even if digital surpasses them in quality, I will still hang onto them for sentimental reasons. I will just be that old kook under the black cloth taking pictures with a light meter.
