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Fry's Electronics has 100 packs of Fujifilm DVD-R's for fifty bucks. I don't usually bargain hunt, but this really makes the idea of keeping multiple copies of digital photographs economically feasable.

I often hear that digital storage medium is inferior to storing silver halide negatives. The image on a negative is right there - you can just look at it, while digital files, even versitile Raw files, must be translated from some more abstract medium before the image can be seen. Thus digital photos rely on a particular technology such as DVD-R to remain usable. Inevitably the example of the 5¹/₄ floppy disk is produced and everybody (who can remember them) agrees that technologies have a short life.

This doesn't, however, concede the future to film images, with digital images being useful for only, say a decade of use after their taking. The same market forces that are made floppies obsolete are making DVD's obsolete as well, it is true, but they are also making film, and for the sake of you existing photos, printing paper and chemicals, as well as optics optomized for enlarging.

Scanning film yeilds no more resolution than the high end digital cameras. Scans also loose brightness range and do not produce Raw files, which may be manipulated, at least in the highlights and midtones, to a much larger degree than can the TIFFs, JPEGs and PSDs produced by scanners. Not to mention, good scanners cost as much as a really good high resolution digital camera, and maybe a lens or two.

The key, at least for the moment, is to re-record onto new media whenever the market changes. I am re-recording some of my images in NEF, DNG, 16 bit TIFF and minimum compression (quality 12), 8 bit JPEG, and a medium compression (quality 10), low rez (900X598 or 480X722 depending on orientation, for on-screen viewing) JPEG formats.

Cheap DVD media will help this, although I will need to batch them to run while I do something else, as it takes about an hour or so to convert, fill and burn a DVD. But that should keep me good for another decade, wouldn't you think?

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