...and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
No, that was for transmission, the second step in the chain after reception.
I can assure you that they wouldn't have been using a 16mm *film* camera to convert the pictures for live transmission(!)
2) Of course not.
Umm... you have to admit it did come across like you were saying they were using 16mm film to convert it for live transmission originally! (^_^)
The 16mm camera was used on NASA's end (i.e. not in Australia), to record the stream parallel to broadcast after its scan conversion.
I thought that's what I said(?!)
On its reception, it was converted to NTSC [1. conversion] then compressed [2. compression] further for transmission from Australia to to the US [3. transmitted from Australia to the US]... and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor [4. archive copy made in US *before* broadcast on network TV].
i.e. They recorded the post-conversion, post-compression, post-intercontinental-relay (but pre-network-broadcast!) signal from a monitor in the US.
...and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
No, that was for transmission, the second step in the chain after reception.
While that might (or might not) be partly true, I can assure you that they wouldn't have been using a 16mm *film* camera to convert the pictures for live transmission(!)
BTW, I took that information directly from the linked article; though, given that it came from the Sunday Express, perhaps it shouldn't be taken entirely on trust:-)
But - seriously - if it is, it will be great to see the thing finally in HD, or whatever NASA called "high quality" at that time.:)
It's not HD; actually, according to the Wired article, the video is a mere 320 lines, 10 frames per second. (There wasn't enough bandwidth for a full NTSC-quality signal).
Even so, *if* these are the tapes of the original moon landing, then it'll let us see it in much higher quality than we could originally.
Yes, if you read that one again, it refers to data tapes, not the original video footage recordings itself:-
A last minute search instead has scientists in Western Australia dusting off several boxes of 'lost' NASA tapes which record surface conditions on the Moon just after Neil Armstrong stepped into space history on 21 July 1969.
After addressing Earth, the American astronaut set up a package of scientific instruments, including a dust detector designed by an Australian physicist. The data collected by the detector was sent back to ground stations on Earth and recorded on magnetic tapes - copies of which are as rare as [i.e. not the same as] the 'misplaced' original video footage of the 1969 touchdown.
Anyway, I was very happy when I first read this report. Having considered it again, the fact it's in the Sunday Express makes me slightly worried; although I don't believe that they'd fabricate something like this outright, it's possible that they might have got the facts wrong and/or overstated them. Plus
If [my emphasis] the visual data can be retrieved, Nasa is set to reveal them to the world as a key plank of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings next month.
Hope it goes well.
Either way, it's truly gobsmacking that NASA spent countless billions (in *1960s* money) on the moon mission and yet were so damn careless with their source data.
For anyone who doesn't know the story and hasn't read the linked Wired article (and you should- for a Wired article, it's surprisingly informative), let me emphasise why this is such a big deal. The footage we see of the moon landings today is (supposedly) far inferior to the original video transmissions. On its reception, it was converted to NTSC (using primitive late-60s technology), then compressed further for transmission from Australia to to the US... and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
I can quite believe that the original footage would be much better quality.
I mean, think about it- they lost the original, high-quality video footage of the first moon landing and we've had to rely on third- if not fourth- generation conversions.
Of course, there's a 4. - putting older computers (especially[my emphasis!] pre-80386 PCs) to good use.
It sounds nice, and it's a noble sentiment. However, isn't there a point where running computers older than a certain age simply to get something out of them is counter-productive?
I mean, my 1998 Pentium-233 system is now (and has been for at least 2-3 years) so old that even many apps designed for "old" PCs won't run on it. A pre-80386 machine (i.e. 286 or older) will at best be approaching 20 years old, if not older! That's ancient.
I doubt such machines would even have PCI in them. Would they (for example, if you were using it as a router) include Ethernet hardware that wasn't a bottleneck on a modern 10/100 or 10/1000 network?
You might argue that getting even a little out of an old machine is better than it doing nothing, but how much electrical power will it require to keep running? Probably more than a small, inobtrusive modern device with the same functionality. Probably more than a six or seven year old laptop that you could get for little anyway.
And that's the thing; you could probably get a six or seven year old computer for next to nothing (I bet many people are throwing working ones out) even if you don't already have one. Ancient, but still massively faster than a 286, 386 or even 486!
Cut a long story short, if someone enjoys doing such stuff with a 286 for the sake of it, then fair enough. I just wouldn't say that it's really that much of a practical and/or environmentally-conscious choice.
Whether or not the Linux reference was actually flamebait or a reference to half-baked Linux distros, he has a point about the reasons for FreeDOS's inclusion.
FreeDOS was a decent idea at the time (pre-Windows 95). I suspect that it still serves- or could serve- a useful purpose for a small proportion of users running legacy software/hardware setups. That's probably a notable amount of people in absolute terms, but small compared to the total computer market.
But it's incredibly unlikely that the vast majority of modern users would consider an MS-DOS workalike an acceptable substitute for Windows. As the guy says, FreeDOS's inclusion in those cases is a technicality, nothing more.
You put batteries from Poundland in your £400 camera YOU are taking the risk.
Is that really true? Poundland are a well-known and long-established chain in the UK. It's quite possible (if not probable) that if there was deemed to be liability and the original manufacturers couldn't be traced then Poundland might be held responsible.
I don't know what it would be reasonable to "expect" (legally) from such cheap batteries though- again, IANAL.
If the damage is caused by a faulty battery- and I would assume it would be apparent if it was or if it wasn't- then surely they can require that the battery be returned with the product?
Which would make it significantly less easy- if not impossible- to try that trick. Not saying it's a perfect solution- I'm sure that other Slashdotters are already thinking about theoretical workarounds, as am I- but it probably *would* stop a significant percentage of chancers, particularly if they risked losing their camera for nothing.
As Nintendo owns the copyright on the SDK, only they can re-license it, not Atari. The GPL is quite specific, if Atari cannot distribute their code in compliance with both Nintendo's SDK license, and the GPL, then they cannot distribute their code at all.
To elaborate on the point- and remember IANAL and neither are most of you:-) - regardless of the GPL, I'd assume (and I might be wrong) that if Atari don't have the rights/permission to apply the GPL to Nintendo's code then their actions couldn't "force" Nintendo's code to be made GPL, regardless of what Atari did.
After all, Nintendo had nothing to do with the GPL themselves, why should they (as a principle) suffer the consequences? (And yeah, I realise that the law doesn't always operate as it *should* operate- something that many IANALs here forget).
AFAIK (pinch of salt) from what I've heard in the past, if Atari did this with their *own* code then it wouldn't *automatically* "make" their code GPL; it would just put them in the position of either (a) having to make their code GPL to comply, or (b) having been distributing the copyrighted GPLed code without permission, whatever the consequences of that would be.
I was surprised that Nikon killed the F6 so quickly [..] and the F100 endures.
I thought it *was* the high-end F6 that was the only other remaining Nikon. According to Wikipedia, the F100 was discontinued and the F6 remains in production; it's listed here, although the FM10 isn't.
Personally, I'd assumed that the FM3A would remain marketed as an "affordable aspirational classic" status for a certain niche of serious amateurs.
Then again, because that would be a less poser-oriented market, those types would probably be less bothered by buying second-hand and take advantage of the glut; and maybe Nikon realised that.
I'm not sure that the F6 or F100 are "classic" enough for "I'm using an expensive film camera" posters. Anyone who liked their techie modernness would probably go digital and I suspect that the people they're still being sold to are actually serious film users.
People will make server emulators, allowing the client to communicate with a separate shard detached from the official servers.
Doesn't really matter if essential and significant parts of the game logic are held on those servers and the interface is just a hollow shell. They'd essentially have to rewrite whole parts of the game.
As for the DS type games... you're right. But if people can't make money from them, then the majority of those games simply won't be made.
They contract out to the one lab left in the country that develops Kodachrome.
What about the other countries, you [slightly dim and insular person]? THE country my [posterior], [I have a low opinion of you].
(Altered to remove trollosity;-) ).
Last I heard, Dwayne's Photo in the US (not even owned by Kodak themselves) is the only lab in the *world* processing Kodachrome for end-users. The writing was been pretty obviously on the wall when things got to that stage.
Someone had a link to a wikipedia article on Fujifilm Velvia as an example of another popular film which is still being sold.
Kodachrome's problem is that it's *very* nonstandard compared to almost all other slide films on the market- they use E6, Kodachrome uses its own specific process and chemicals that's also much harder to deal with. Last I heard, there's only one lab in the world processes Kodachrome now, and it's not even owned by Kodak themselves (who contract out their processing to them). (*)
Sad, but not surprising that Kodachrome is being discontinued.
Kodachrome used to be *the* best slide film, but its problem was firstly that the more saturated, but standard E6-process Velvia came along in the late-80s/early-90s and ate into its market; and now that market has itself shrunk to a tiny proportion of what it used to be. Velvia can probably survive longer simply because it's more standard.
(*) In the UK, Kodachrome comes with mailers for Kodak to process it. Apparently for antitrust reasons this was stopped in the US; but I don't know if there were *ever* many independent places that did it. To all intents and purposes, you had to get Kodachrome processed by Kodak.
No, you missed the point. You seemed to be complaining specifically about JPEG's compression making it potentially indecipherable/unreadable versus uncompressed formats.
My response was that if we're still able to get a computer- or device- comparable to those in use today to read and decode an uncompressed file format on some arbitrary medium, and we still have the knowledge to do this, then we'll almost certainly still be able to decode JPEGs.
If things get so bad that we don't have the hardware and/or knowledge to read the insanely common JPEG format, then it's very unlikely that we'll have the hardware and/or knowledge to read uncompressed formats either.
Nikon sells a student manual focus camera, the FM10. Amazon's selling it (through a third party vendor) for $290 with a kit zoom lens (35-70mm, f/3.5-4.8, not very good for a film student).
Bear in mind that the FM-10 isn't made by Nikon themselves, but by Cosina, and is essentially a modified version of a Cosina chassis that was also used for the "Canon" T60.
As far as I'm aware, it's only one of two "Nikon" film cameras still on the market, the other being their high-end flagship model.
FWIW I was pretty surprised when Nikon abruptly announced the end of all their other film models at the start of 2006. I knew that digital SLRs were going to take over, and probably quite fast- Nikon probably knew this as well, from the way it happened in the point-and-shoot market a few years previously. But I assumed that there would still be people who wanted film SLRs, and was surprised that they didn't keep selling their mid-range FM3A.
Of course, what Nikon had probably realised- correctly- (and I didn't) was that the people switching to digital SLRs would result in a glut of FM3As and similar Nikons hitting the secondhand market. As you said, there are so many used film bodies and lenses out there that there's no sense in buying new.
That depends. My fairly cheap flatbed scanner has a negative/transparency facility where what you say is true; the poor quality of the lens meant that negative scans were noticably softer than those of the prints. (Making the purported resolution of the sensor itself irrelevant- this is why you shouldn't rely on box specs alone). No amount of messing about with sharpening could compensate for the softness at small scales.
On the other hand, even my cheapass dedicated film scanner could scan well enough that it would match or beat a print scan from the flatbed in terms of detail.
And in both cases, the neg scans were better than those of the prints in vibrancy and shadow detail; sometimes significantly so. (Partly I'd guess this is due to the limitations of older automatic print machines' compromise attempts at exposure which might result in negative highlights getting bleached out if other parts were underexposed. But I also find that scans from prints just have a "secondhand" feel and lack of punch that is far more noticable if you compare the two side by side).
Of course, for run-of-the-mill snapshots, it probably isn't worth sweating this; it's quicker, simpler and more sensible just to scan the prints en masse if the photos weren't that technically great (or important) in the first place. I did that, and only redid a small proportion when I got the film scanner for that reason.
But you *can* get better quality from negs, no doubt about it. Just not on a cheapass flatbed.
In my experience, the real biggest 'problem' caused by digital photography is people don't tend to throw away the dreck. My parents have several thousand of photos -and they've only had a digital camera for 3 or 4 years.
You probably don't *need* to throw away the dreck; unless it's really obviously crap or embarrassing:). You simply move all the less worthwhile stuff to another folder and forget about it so you can concentrate on organising and viewing the good stuff without it getting in the way.
If there's anything there of interest after all in the future, you can probably fish it out with a bit of work, if not- who cares, you can store half-a-million hi-res photos on a terabyte drive.:-)
Don't get me wrong, those are great and I have many... but it doesn't satisfy the fact that jpeg is a compressed file and the compression algorithms can be lost in time.
Honestly? I could understand your concern if it was about some esoteric undocumented proprietary scheme.
But JPEG is an *incredibly* widely used format and there are countless programs that can process it (including ones that can resave it in uncompressed formats, if you're really that bothered.)
It's unlikely that things would get so bad that we couldn't even reverse engineer or understand JPEG (let alone run legacy decoding apps) yet we could still conveniently access and run the computer equipment necessary to read and display uncompressed formats. Any circumstances that prevent the former will almost certainly prevent the latter; worrying about compression is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all sports cars get shitty mileage.
If I'm paying good money for a sports car, it damn well *better* get shitty mileage!
Yeah, and just to keep the math simple, we'll assume that the chickens are perfect spheres.
Can we assume that they're moving in simple harmonic motion?
So?! It was still the first men on the moon, regardless. It's historic and unreproducible, regardless of how many people follow.
...and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
No, that was for transmission, the second step in the chain after reception.
I can assure you that they wouldn't have been using a 16mm *film* camera to convert the pictures for live transmission(!)
2) Of course not.
Umm... you have to admit it did come across like you were saying they were using 16mm film to convert it for live transmission originally! (^_^)
The 16mm camera was used on NASA's end (i.e. not in Australia), to record the stream parallel to broadcast after its scan conversion.
I thought that's what I said(?!)
On its reception, it was converted to NTSC [1. conversion] then compressed [2. compression] further for transmission from Australia to to the US [3. transmitted from Australia to the US] ... and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor [4. archive copy made in US *before* broadcast on network TV] .
i.e. They recorded the post-conversion, post-compression, post-intercontinental-relay (but pre-network-broadcast!) signal from a monitor in the US.
...and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
No, that was for transmission, the second step in the chain after reception.
While that might (or might not) be partly true, I can assure you that they wouldn't have been using a 16mm *film* camera to convert the pictures for live transmission(!)
:-)
BTW, I took that information directly from the linked article; though, given that it came from the Sunday Express, perhaps it shouldn't be taken entirely on trust
But - seriously - if it is, it will be great to see the thing finally in HD, or whatever NASA called "high quality" at that time. :)
It's not HD; actually, according to the Wired article, the video is a mere 320 lines, 10 frames per second. (There wasn't enough bandwidth for a full NTSC-quality signal).
Even so, *if* these are the tapes of the original moon landing, then it'll let us see it in much higher quality than we could originally.
A last minute search instead has scientists in Western Australia dusting off several boxes of 'lost' NASA tapes which record surface conditions on the Moon just after Neil Armstrong stepped into space history on 21 July 1969.
After addressing Earth, the American astronaut set up a package of scientific instruments, including a dust detector designed by an Australian physicist. The data collected by the detector was sent back to ground stations on Earth and recorded on magnetic tapes - copies of which are as rare as [i.e. not the same as] the 'misplaced' original video footage of the 1969 touchdown.
Anyway, I was very happy when I first read this report. Having considered it again, the fact it's in the Sunday Express makes me slightly worried; although I don't believe that they'd fabricate something like this outright, it's possible that they might have got the facts wrong and/or overstated them. Plus
If [my emphasis] the visual data can be retrieved, Nasa is set to reveal them to the world as a key plank of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings next month.
Hope it goes well.
Either way, it's truly gobsmacking that NASA spent countless billions (in *1960s* money) on the moon mission and yet were so damn careless with their source data. For anyone who doesn't know the story and hasn't read the linked Wired article (and you should- for a Wired article, it's surprisingly informative), let me emphasise why this is such a big deal. The footage we see of the moon landings today is (supposedly) far inferior to the original video transmissions. On its reception, it was converted to NTSC (using primitive late-60s technology), then compressed further for transmission from Australia to to the US... and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
I can quite believe that the original footage would be much better quality.
I mean, think about it- they lost the original, high-quality video footage of the first moon landing and we've had to rely on third- if not fourth- generation conversions.
Unbelievable.
Of course, there's a 4. - putting older computers (especially [my emphasis!] pre-80386 PCs) to good use.
It sounds nice, and it's a noble sentiment. However, isn't there a point where running computers older than a certain age simply to get something out of them is counter-productive?
I mean, my 1998 Pentium-233 system is now (and has been for at least 2-3 years) so old that even many apps designed for "old" PCs won't run on it. A pre-80386 machine (i.e. 286 or older) will at best be approaching 20 years old, if not older! That's ancient.
I doubt such machines would even have PCI in them. Would they (for example, if you were using it as a router) include Ethernet hardware that wasn't a bottleneck on a modern 10/100 or 10/1000 network?
You might argue that getting even a little out of an old machine is better than it doing nothing, but how much electrical power will it require to keep running? Probably more than a small, inobtrusive modern device with the same functionality. Probably more than a six or seven year old laptop that you could get for little anyway.
And that's the thing; you could probably get a six or seven year old computer for next to nothing (I bet many people are throwing working ones out) even if you don't already have one. Ancient, but still massively faster than a 286, 386 or even 486!
Cut a long story short, if someone enjoys doing such stuff with a 286 for the sake of it, then fair enough. I just wouldn't say that it's really that much of a practical and/or environmentally-conscious choice.
Microsoft practically forced the whole world into rewriting most of their applications for several times now
Did they really?
Yes they did. Explain existence of "Compatibility modes"
By definition(!) the Windows "compatibility modes" provide newer versions of Windows with (some) compatibility with older software.
Whether or not the Linux reference was actually flamebait or a reference to half-baked Linux distros, he has a point about the reasons for FreeDOS's inclusion.
FreeDOS was a decent idea at the time (pre-Windows 95). I suspect that it still serves- or could serve- a useful purpose for a small proportion of users running legacy software/hardware setups. That's probably a notable amount of people in absolute terms, but small compared to the total computer market.
But it's incredibly unlikely that the vast majority of modern users would consider an MS-DOS workalike an acceptable substitute for Windows. As the guy says, FreeDOS's inclusion in those cases is a technicality, nothing more.
"Many of those tools are being put to work these days to find more realistic ways of breaking things"
I rest my case.
Or even this. (The form only allows two names, but the URL seems to let you have as many as you want).
"News" from the same people who brought you this story? Indeed.
You put batteries from Poundland in your £400 camera YOU are taking the risk.
Is that really true? Poundland are a well-known and long-established chain in the UK. It's quite possible (if not probable) that if there was deemed to be liability and the original manufacturers couldn't be traced then Poundland might be held responsible.
I don't know what it would be reasonable to "expect" (legally) from such cheap batteries though- again, IANAL.
If the damage is caused by a faulty battery- and I would assume it would be apparent if it was or if it wasn't- then surely they can require that the battery be returned with the product?
Which would make it significantly less easy- if not impossible- to try that trick. Not saying it's a perfect solution- I'm sure that other Slashdotters are already thinking about theoretical workarounds, as am I- but it probably *would* stop a significant percentage of chancers, particularly if they risked losing their camera for nothing.
As Nintendo owns the copyright on the SDK, only they can re-license it, not Atari. The GPL is quite specific, if Atari cannot distribute their code in compliance with both Nintendo's SDK license, and the GPL, then they cannot distribute their code at all.
To elaborate on the point- and remember IANAL and neither are most of you :-) - regardless of the GPL, I'd assume (and I might be wrong) that if Atari don't have the rights/permission to apply the GPL to Nintendo's code then their actions couldn't "force" Nintendo's code to be made GPL, regardless of what Atari did.
After all, Nintendo had nothing to do with the GPL themselves, why should they (as a principle) suffer the consequences? (And yeah, I realise that the law doesn't always operate as it *should* operate- something that many IANALs here forget).
AFAIK (pinch of salt) from what I've heard in the past, if Atari did this with their *own* code then it wouldn't *automatically* "make" their code GPL; it would just put them in the position of either (a) having to make their code GPL to comply, or (b) having been distributing the copyrighted GPLed code without permission, whatever the consequences of that would be.
I was surprised that Nikon killed the F6 so quickly [..] and the F100 endures.
I thought it *was* the high-end F6 that was the only other remaining Nikon. According to Wikipedia, the F100 was discontinued and the F6 remains in production; it's listed here, although the FM10 isn't.
Personally, I'd assumed that the FM3A would remain marketed as an "affordable aspirational classic" status for a certain niche of serious amateurs.
Then again, because that would be a less poser-oriented market, those types would probably be less bothered by buying second-hand and take advantage of the glut; and maybe Nikon realised that.
I'm not sure that the F6 or F100 are "classic" enough for "I'm using an expensive film camera" posters. Anyone who liked their techie modernness would probably go digital and I suspect that the people they're still being sold to are actually serious film users.
People will make server emulators, allowing the client to communicate with a separate shard detached from the official servers.
Doesn't really matter if essential and significant parts of the game logic are held on those servers and the interface is just a hollow shell. They'd essentially have to rewrite whole parts of the game.
As for the DS type games... you're right. But if people can't make money from them, then the majority of those games simply won't be made.
They contract out to the one lab left in the country that develops Kodachrome.
What about the other countries, you [slightly dim and insular person]? THE country my [posterior], [I have a low opinion of you].
(Altered to remove trollosity ;-) ).
Last I heard, Dwayne's Photo in the US (not even owned by Kodak themselves) is the only lab in the *world* processing Kodachrome for end-users. The writing was been pretty obviously on the wall when things got to that stage.
Someone had a link to a wikipedia article on Fujifilm Velvia as an example of another popular film which is still being sold.
Kodachrome's problem is that it's *very* nonstandard compared to almost all other slide films on the market- they use E6, Kodachrome uses its own specific process and chemicals that's also much harder to deal with. Last I heard, there's only one lab in the world processes Kodachrome now, and it's not even owned by Kodak themselves (who contract out their processing to them). (*)
Sad, but not surprising that Kodachrome is being discontinued.
Kodachrome used to be *the* best slide film, but its problem was firstly that the more saturated, but standard E6-process Velvia came along in the late-80s/early-90s and ate into its market; and now that market has itself shrunk to a tiny proportion of what it used to be. Velvia can probably survive longer simply because it's more standard.
(*) In the UK, Kodachrome comes with mailers for Kodak to process it. Apparently for antitrust reasons this was stopped in the US; but I don't know if there were *ever* many independent places that did it. To all intents and purposes, you had to get Kodachrome processed by Kodak.
No, you missed the point. You seemed to be complaining specifically about JPEG's compression making it potentially indecipherable/unreadable versus uncompressed formats.
My response was that if we're still able to get a computer- or device- comparable to those in use today to read and decode an uncompressed file format on some arbitrary medium, and we still have the knowledge to do this, then we'll almost certainly still be able to decode JPEGs.
If things get so bad that we don't have the hardware and/or knowledge to read the insanely common JPEG format, then it's very unlikely that we'll have the hardware and/or knowledge to read uncompressed formats either.
Nikon sells a student manual focus camera, the FM10. Amazon's selling it (through a third party vendor) for $290 with a kit zoom lens (35-70mm, f/3.5-4.8, not very good for a film student).
Bear in mind that the FM-10 isn't made by Nikon themselves, but by Cosina, and is essentially a modified version of a Cosina chassis that was also used for the "Canon" T60.
As far as I'm aware, it's only one of two "Nikon" film cameras still on the market, the other being their high-end flagship model.
FWIW I was pretty surprised when Nikon abruptly announced the end of all their other film models at the start of 2006. I knew that digital SLRs were going to take over, and probably quite fast- Nikon probably knew this as well, from the way it happened in the point-and-shoot market a few years previously. But I assumed that there would still be people who wanted film SLRs, and was surprised that they didn't keep selling their mid-range FM3A.
Of course, what Nikon had probably realised- correctly- (and I didn't) was that the people switching to digital SLRs would result in a glut of FM3As and similar Nikons hitting the secondhand market. As you said, there are so many used film bodies and lenses out there that there's no sense in buying new.
That depends. My fairly cheap flatbed scanner has a negative/transparency facility where what you say is true; the poor quality of the lens meant that negative scans were noticably softer than those of the prints. (Making the purported resolution of the sensor itself irrelevant- this is why you shouldn't rely on box specs alone). No amount of messing about with sharpening could compensate for the softness at small scales.
On the other hand, even my cheapass dedicated film scanner could scan well enough that it would match or beat a print scan from the flatbed in terms of detail.
And in both cases, the neg scans were better than those of the prints in vibrancy and shadow detail; sometimes significantly so. (Partly I'd guess this is due to the limitations of older automatic print machines' compromise attempts at exposure which might result in negative highlights getting bleached out if other parts were underexposed. But I also find that scans from prints just have a "secondhand" feel and lack of punch that is far more noticable if you compare the two side by side).
Of course, for run-of-the-mill snapshots, it probably isn't worth sweating this; it's quicker, simpler and more sensible just to scan the prints en masse if the photos weren't that technically great (or important) in the first place. I did that, and only redid a small proportion when I got the film scanner for that reason.
But you *can* get better quality from negs, no doubt about it. Just not on a cheapass flatbed.
In my experience, the real biggest 'problem' caused by digital photography is people don't tend to throw away the dreck. My parents have several thousand of photos -and they've only had a digital camera for 3 or 4 years.
You probably don't *need* to throw away the dreck; unless it's really obviously crap or embarrassing :). You simply move all the less worthwhile stuff to another folder and forget about it so you can concentrate on organising and viewing the good stuff without it getting in the way.
:-)
If there's anything there of interest after all in the future, you can probably fish it out with a bit of work, if not- who cares, you can store half-a-million hi-res photos on a terabyte drive.
Don't get me wrong, those are great and I have many... but it doesn't satisfy the fact that jpeg is a compressed file and the compression algorithms can be lost in time.
Honestly? I could understand your concern if it was about some esoteric undocumented proprietary scheme.
But JPEG is an *incredibly* widely used format and there are countless programs that can process it (including ones that can resave it in uncompressed formats, if you're really that bothered.)
It's unlikely that things would get so bad that we couldn't even reverse engineer or understand JPEG (let alone run legacy decoding apps) yet we could still conveniently access and run the computer equipment necessary to read and display uncompressed formats. Any circumstances that prevent the former will almost certainly prevent the latter; worrying about compression is just silly.