Re: Which scanners REALLY provide 36 bit output? HP?

From: Steve Underwood (steveu@coppice.org)
Date: Wed Dec 13 2000 - 17:58:07 PST

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    Stephen Williams wrote:

    > And none of this is good news to someone who wants to create archival
    > images of precious documents. We've been there, too, and the conclusion
    > is that for all but the most extreme cases, good ol' 12bit JPEG (and an
    > environmentally controlled vault) are about as good as is worth the
    > effort. If some hot new image processing technique comes to light, you
    > are just going to have to accept the reality that you will need to open
    > the vault and rescan the document with the lighting/sensors required
    > of the technique.

    If you want to do archival storage of documents, do it on paper. This will
    greatly outlast any digital storage medium. CDs can fail in as little as a year
    (any make) despite the claims of 25 years for a pressed CD (which isn't that
    impressive anyway) and 70-100 years for CDR (which seems completely bogus). I
    live in a sauna, and things tend to fail fast, but even in dryer climates you
    can never rely of any digital medium. Some years ago in the UK we stored
    precious reels of data tape in a fully controlled environment to the makers
    (Ampex) spec. In just two years the layers of tape had coalesced so well we
    could saw through the block of tape like it was a block of wood. Of course such
    extreme failure doesn't always happen. However, since you cannot tell when it
    will, you cannot rely of these media. Close monitoring and recopying seems a
    useless precaution, when degradation can occur so fast.

    Regards,
    Steve

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