[filmscanners] Re: Bad News on CD longevity

["Arthur Entlich" <artistic-1@shaw.ca>]

Interesting.  People on this very list told me last year or so that my
use of mainly CD-RW was asking for disaster and that they couldn't be
trusted and I should use only CD-R.  I also argued that it seemed to me
the phase-change technology was a more stable and reliable method.

Also, the information from the Dutch testing is current and they
themselves claim there is a vast difference between 2001 and now, just 2
years later, or less, not the five years you are speaking of, so if
accurate, it seems things may have changed quite a bit in 5 years since
the study you discuss was designed.

When you speak about playing a 10 year old Paul Simon CD, is it a Paul
Simon CD, or a Paul Simon CD-R (or CD-RW?)

Art


Austin Smith wrote:

> I'm not convinced that the CD is as suspect as that Dutch review indicates.
> The digital industry has known for some years that the CD-R is not the
> panacea that archivists hoped for, but premium CD-R's offer good, although
> not archival, life.  I read a good study on this four or five years ago in a
> publication aimed at the digital photography/photo processing industries in
> reference to the search for a medium that would allow archival
> digitalization of the photography collections of the Library of Congress,
> Smithsonian Institution, etc.  The final conclusion was that the CDR-W
> offered much better life than CD-R's, life approaching 100 years when
> handled properly.  They DID make the point that there some really crappy
> CD's and CD-R's on the market, but that the CDR-W was a different animal,
> and didn't suffer from the same weaknesses.  Incidentally, I just cranked up
> a ten year old Paul Simon CD just to make sure I didn't have a cabinet full
> of scrap CD's.  It played just fine.
>


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