Originally posted by micromacro So far I see that film is a winner.
As soon as you scan a piece of film, you have invested time and money into digitizing it. The question for me is how do you get a good return on your investment? For starters, you need to make relatively quick use of a digitized image, because long-term storage requires additional investment of time and money. If you delay digitizing your film until you have a high value need for it, you get a better return on your investment.
The value of any image, digital or film, goes down over time; its value is related to the importance of what is recorded in the image and past events are less important than current events. The value of an image is also dependent on the quality of that image, but the value of image quality also goes down over time, so you can only slow down the declining value of images over time by investing time and money in preserving the quality of the image, not prevent that decline. Old pictures have value because they are the only record left of what something or someone looked like, as long as the current quality of that image is sufficient to be decipherable the picture is worth something. Digital images have a sudden decline in quality, one day they are indistinguishable (for the most part) from their original condition and the next day they are indecipherable. The most faded image on film is worth more than an indecipherable digital image.
If preserving film requires less of an investment than preserving digital images, it is better to hold off digitizing unless you have an immediate need for a digital version of that image. Images also go down in value when they are transferred to a different medium, so transferring an image from a piece of film to a digital file will reduce the value of that image. Only if the quality of the image on film is going to deteriorate over time at such a fast rate that its value will decline faster from loss of quality than loss of importance, should you consider digitizing that image solely for the purpose of preserving it. So, in conclusion, if your dilemma is how to preserve your film images, the winner indeed is film.
By the way, I'm all for preserving digital images on external hard drives, I have 20 year old scans on CD's, but copying files to a hard drive over a USB cable is faster and easier than copying them to an optical disk. For me, the time investment required to copy a terabyte of digital files to DVDs or Blu-ray disks is greater than the cost of a 1TB external hard drive and if I don't need to open those files during the lifetime of that external hard drive (with the opportunity to transfer them to another digital device without any significant additional time investment), maybe they aren't that valuable to begin with.