Inkjet Photo Print Longevity Lacking

Yet another Anonymous Coward writes to tell us about a piece up at the NYTimes on the (lack of) longevity of photos printed on inkjet printers. As the article's title says, somewhat alarmingly, "It isn't that images fade, it's that they can vanish." The problem is actually more nuanced than this; it's that no-one has a reliable and standardized way of testing inkjet prints for longevity. From the article: "The life of color inkjet prints has also been hindered by the origins of the technology, which was mainly intended for printing things like pie charts, said Nils Miller, a scientist at Hewlett-Packard. 'The initial emphasis was, how do we get bright colors on plain paper," Dr. Miller said. "Permanence was not really on the radar screen yet.'"

Comments

Try Hemp !!!

[ShakaZ]

Strange thing we have so much trouble preventing paper & color degrading over time when centuries ago the problem has already been solved. Just look at all those books written on hemp that are still in great shape & with bright colours that give us insight over the knowledge of past human civilization. It's a shame we're in an era now where mindless consumerism and capitalism are so powerful that products we buy don't have to perform anymore as they did in the past and still cost more... examples of this are everywhere, tasteless fruit & vegetables, electronic devices that barely make it past the warranty date, products that cost more because they're better eventhough the new process to produce them costs less, new products that are pushed on the market in order to maintain royalties while not adding anything usefull or even being of lower quality or environmentally more dangerous, etc...

Who expects digital to last forever?

[skoda]

Everyone here with digital data from 30 years ago raise your hand.

Everyone here with photographs from 30+ years ago raise your hand.

We need photographs to last "forever" because they are more easily kept, more permanent, more durable than the digital originals.

Re:No big deal

[DerekLyons]

Agreed, but I have recorded CDRs that can no longer be read. Same for Iomega ZIP and JAZ disks (no drives).

So do I, but the data that was on them now occupies a tiny portion of the hard drives in my current computers. It's been copied onto half a dozen different backup formats, and I expect it'll migrate across a multitude more in the course of my life.

That's fine while you are alive - but what happens after?
 
 

Preserving digital information takes less effort than storing paper prints.

When my grandmother had to be moved into a nursing home, my mom was cleaning out her house and found photograph albums from the 1950's. Preserving them had taken exactly zero effort, they were simply stored on a shelf. They required no hardware to view, there were no worries about changing formats, etc... etc... They simply sat waiting for fifty years.
 
That's the key difference between physical and digital preservation. Digital preservation requires ongoing maintenance and attention (even if it does make multiple backups to be made much easier). Forget just once to copy those ZIP disks (before the drive dies forever), and the data is gone.
 
Physical preservation requires much less attention, and will survive even decades of inattention. Even on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in a back bedroom of an un-airconditioned house - in Florida.