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Re[2]: [OM] OT: Lordly Companies and mass-ware

Subject: Re[2]: [OM] OT: Lordly Companies and mass-ware
From: Dave Haynie <dhaynie@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 11:11:35 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 04 Jan 1999 17:59:47 +0000, Richard Ross 
<richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> jammed all night, and by sunrise was 
overheard remarking:

> At 12:08 04/01/99 -0500, you wrote:

> >Your $3000 450mh pentium or Powermac G3 will be worth maybe $500 in
> > three years. Your Leica, Mamiya, or Oly will be worth nearly what
> > you paid, maybe more.

> What's a first generation digital camera worth now, after a couple of
> years?  My £175 OM-2SP is still worth, well, at least £175.

Sure thing. I paid about $350 for my OM-4 years back. I could sell it
for more, but of course, those wouldn't be 1986 dollars (or yen, as it
were) anyway. 

The real point is the differences between immature and rapidly evolving 
technologies, such as computers, versus fairly mature technologies like
cameras. A digital camera is essentially a special-purpose computer,
still rapidly evolving, and as such, on the same steep price/performance
slope as any computer. It's also very likely that an extreme few, if any,
of these digital cameras will fall into the "collectable" niche (such as
the M-1, which of course, in all other ways was improved upon in the
OM-1, OM-1 MD, and OM-1n, yet can easily sell for many times the price,
simply because it's rare and significant). 

> Compare the digital and wet darkrooms as well......  Potentially lower
> materials costs are soon gobbled up by equipment depreciation.  And I'll
> bet my last enlarger bulb that in 30 years' time you won't be able to get
> Zip drives and whatever repaired, so what of your archived digital pix
> then.....? ;-)

You need to put them on CD-Rs now, switch to DVD-Rs in 2007 , and then
tell your intelligent agent to copy your whole DVD collection those
terabyte 3D datacubes in 2025 or so....

But really, most of the time, you'll have plenty of warning before a
format goes away. The new ZIP, at 250MB, reads the old format (and the
old drives are still made), so you know these are going to be available
for at least five or so years. If in three years IoMega announced a new,
incompatible ZIP format, or (worse yet), goes out of business, you're
not dead yet, but you need to think about transferring that ZIP
collection to something else. Industry standards like CDs have a really
long life, simply because they're so engrained, someone will be making
them long after most of the industry has moved on (and, in fact, the
chances of upward compatibility are extremely good). 

When things to vanish, prepare for it. As we were talking about last
fall with the currently defunct state of SyQuest, if you're on Quest or
SyJet discs, you might seriously think about picking up a backup unit (I
have one I'll sell cheap) if you're really committed to it, or switching
to another format if you're not. 

This is really your only choice. Unless you have that Crystal Ball
peripheral working, you can't guess what's going to be here or not be
here in 20 years. You have to run with what you consider the best for
you today, and switch later on if necessary. I have a whole archive of
stuff I did on computers over 15 years ago -- all fits on a small piece
of one CD today, and it's all in a different format than it was back
then. It did take a little work to do the conversions.

Some digital format means your scans look as good 20 years hence,
assuming you can still access the data. You can guarantee your negatives
and prints will fade some in that time, more or less depending on the
medium and how you store them. 

--
Dave Haynie  | V.P. Technology, Met@box Infonet, AG |  http://www.metabox.de
Be Dev #2024 | NB851 Powered! | Amiga 2000, 3000, 4000, PIOS One



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