Posted on 12/30/2010 4:04:06 AM PST by Second Amendment First
Did your Polaroid film come with the little brush in a tube that smelt of vinegar (or was it elderberries—I forget)?
Holy crap! You just made my week. Please tell me more, here or in freepmail. Thank you!
A colleague of mine worked at a fairly big lab in the Chicago area. They employed blind folks to do the unloading of the film cassettes (in a darkroom, of course) and taping the film into large rolls for the processing machines. Makes sense, no?
One night, a (sighted) employee left the light on in the film unloading room. Next morning, the lab was opened by one of the blind workers and he began his duties. Hilarity ensued.
Heck already! Assuming the stuff isn’t broken, you can still take pics with it!
I don’t have an Kodachome film, but do have a half dozen mailers in an old camera bag.
Minolta is out of business. I can’t get batteries for it and it needs a good cleaning and adjustment. It cost me more to have it cleaned than the camera body costs new.
There was a big stink about the impermanence of the color from the prints from the first generation or two of Epson Photo inkjet printers. Users (such as myself) noticed prints going yellow with age. Some of them documented their experience and eventually Epson took notice of the bad press and set about to solve the problem. They commissioned an independent testing lab to test their old and newer inks, and began to publish results on the permanence of the prints from their newer inks and papers. Various theories on the degradation mechanism have been propounded, including UV (the classic mechanism for all color materials) and Ozone.
There is a distinction between the two basic types of inkjet inks: One is dye-based, and the other is pigment-based. Pigment based inks are more color stable, it is said, but are more expensive and difficult to accommodate in an inkjet system; until recently, they tended to exhibit a slightly smaller color gamut also. If you look at the current Epson line, you can see a distinct price division between the dye-based and pigment-based inkjet photo printers.
**That’s where he’s been for the last few months.**
If yuou are talking about Willie Green, he has been banned.
http://www.freerepublic.com/~williegreen/
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:williegreen/index?brevity=full;tab=comments
He did not take JR’s warnings.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2607597/posts?page=65#65
PowderMonkey wrote:
“Everyting I’ve placed on CDs in the last 10 years is gone.”
Further on, rarestia added:
“There are also optical disks out there with a guaranteed 30-year life span, and some high-level backup systems use DVDs with protective cases that are guaranteed for 50 years. They’re available to the public, but be prepared to pay the price for archival. Disk drives are better IMO.”
The problem with CDR’s vis-a-vis “commercially pressed” CD’s is that CDR’s use dyes to register the “1’s” and “0’s” on the disc, instead of having them physically “pressed” as commercial CD’s do.
I believe that what happens over time is that the dyes can fade, making it impossible for the computer to ascertain whether a specific bit is “on” or “off” — hence, errors and unreadability. Also, the reflective coating on the upper portion of the disc can get corroded, again, interfering with the proper decoding of the data.
If you’re burning to CDR’s, you’ve got to use the best “blanks” available and I suggest that you also burn at low speeds, no greater than 4x. Once burned, store them in “mini jewel cases” (I prefer the ones with “black backs” to further limit “light intrusion”), and keep them away from direct sunlight.
For “regular” (consumer-priced) media, I’ve found Verbatim blanks to be the best. Buy them in 100-disc spindles from a place like newegg.com (no financial interest). DON’T buy “the cheap no-name or house CDR’s” just because you can get them at a better price.
You can also get “gold plated” blanks such as these:
http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-96159-UltraLife-Archival-Recordable/dp/B000SDYXNO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1293728804&sr=8-3
Of course, they cost more but these are “archival grade” blanks — the gold actually enhances the longevity of the discs.
I have several thousand homemade CD’s, mostly music CD’s starting from 2003, and have yet to pick an older one from storage that was unplayable.
When I first experimented with burning CD’s back around 1997 or so, I made a few copies of my system software CDs and just set them down on the corner of my desk. There they have lain, totally unprotected (no slip cases) for 13 years (sometimes I’m slow to put stuff away, grin). I just took one of them and put it in my DVD/CD drive on this Mac. The disk “mounted right up” in the Finder, and anything I tried to open and check looked just fine!
For archiving to hard drive media, here’s a gadget that makes things easy:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
These are cheap and easy to use. There are even some “dual docks” that mount two hard drives at once.
For those who need speeds faster than USB, there is a firewire800/eSATA version called the “Voyager” from Other World Computing.
Get a dock and a few hard drives of your choice, and it’s easy to create and access multiple copies of data. Going to the “dock paradigm” frees you from being tied to external drives each in its own enclosure. There is always the possibility that the enclosure (and not the drive inside) can go bad on you. By “breaking this link” between drive and enclosure (hence, the “dock”), you have more options and it’s easier to overcome problems. If a drive goes bad, get a new drive. If the _dock_ goes bad, just get another dock. Store the bare drives in anti-static bags or other containers. You can even store them offsite.
Umm, what do you mean by instant?
Also, I presume you’re talking about a manual focus camera.
Part of the delay you see in DSLRs is from the autofocus process, which in most modes must finalize the focus after you do the (initial stage of) the button press.
If you switch to manual focus, the two generations of camera come closer to parity.
There is still the matter of autoexposure, and this does add a little extra time to the response.
The more expensive DSLRs (such as the EOS-1 series) pull every mechanical and electronic trick in the book to minimize the exposure delay. Go to a camera shop and play with one of these for a minute. Also, switch off autofocus to make it a fair test.
How old is your Minolta? The SRTx0x series had a horizontal travelling focal plane shutter that is easily beaten by the vertical-travelling shutters of SLRs of the past 20 years or so. You can tell this by looking up the maximum electronic flash sync speed. If it’s 1/60 or less, it’s a horizontal travelling shutter. If it’s 1/90, it might be either. If it’s over 1/90, it’s a vertical travelling shutter.
By the way, an amusing artifact of the focal plane shutter is sometimes called “motion distortion.” Old sheet-film cameras often had slow-moving vertical-travel focal plane shutters whose horizontal slits would travel from bottom to top. The exposure of any part of the film frame could be short by making the slit betweeen leading and trailing curtains be narrow, but the overall time for completion of the shot would be large, perhaps 1/20 second. Therefore, a picture of a race car in motion might be sharp; but it would make the car, and especially its wheels, appear to be leaning forward.
I was a slow convert to digital. The shutter delay is an avoidable issue on digital SLRs in the last five years. If you are partially depressed and focused, there is no delay more than any other auto film camera of recent vintage.
The real trial is the low light levels of the view finders due to the chips being sized smaller and giving the 1.5 lens factor in most cameras. If money was no object, for that issue alone I would buy a full frame camera in digital like a Nikon FX series for the light gathering of the viewfinder alone.
Poignant story.
Not sure that Kodachrome was the “first successful” color film, as I think color negative had already appeared. Kodachrome — like all “chrome” films — was reversal film: the negative that comes out of the camera is chemically processed to become a high-contrast positive print. The main difference between Kodachrome and other reversal films was that the color dyes — volatile and very sensitive to temperature — were kept separate from the film itself, in the processing lab, where they could be carefully temperature controlled. That’s why the colors in Kodachrome were always so saturated and brilliant.
Color negative film yields a far less brilliant print, but the advantage was that you had a template — the negative — from which you could continue to make a number of prints before wearing out the negative completely. However, in terms of industry standards, pretty much all “high end” photography — commercial table-top photography, fashion photography, etc. — were all shot with Kodachrome. Low-end shoots whose clients would want to make multiple copies — weddings, birthdays, actor headshots, etc. — were usually shot with negative.
Wow! Digital photography and image manipulation applications like Photoshop have changed everything!
Same basic technology. You have to guess which kind of interface (USB vs. SD card slot) will be around longer.
See all those big white lenses at sporting events around the world? They all have Canon EOS-1D's hung on their hind ends.
Sure do. But not for action photograpy. And they run from $10K for a back up to $30K+ for an entire camera.
No noticeable delay between press and click.
Part of the delay you see in DSLRs is from the autofocus process
The camera is a first-generation Minolta Maxxum. I'm used to the half-press for autofocus, but the final press (or full press in manual mode) still results in an instant shutter release.
I think I'll have to go play if you say there are digitals out there like this.
[I had a lot my digital photos stored on CDs. The disks have gone bad,]
I rotate my backups onto portable hard disk drives. With 2TB drives presently <$90 it’s cheaper than using writable DVD’s and a whole lot faster too.
Haven’t lost an image since going digital in 2002.
Aw, maaaaaaa. Why'dja do that?
lyrics by Paul Simon
It looks like Willie picked a fight with the wrong guy...
Yup, and Willie had the gall to put his opus on his about page. It was something to the effect that his views of conservation were not welcomed here anymore.
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