OT: 90 Year Old Photos

fldave wrote on 10/15/2006, 8:47 PM

The Lumiere brothers must have been geniuses to have these last 90 years. Here is a link to 90 year old COLOR photos from World War I.

WWI Color Photos

No verification that they are actually true color prints originally. I've seen a lot of "colorized" black and white photos, and these look real to me.

Any hope of our productions lasting this long???

Comments

Serena wrote on 10/15/2006, 9:26 PM

Real alright.
Almost certainly our work will be unplayable in 90 years (15?) because it relies on a technology that becomes rapidly obsolete with little backward compatibility. Twenty years ago I could find no machines to read data tapes written on the once ubiquitous VAX computers, so that data was lost forever. Certainly Lumiere used nitrate stock which now would be very unstable (chemically and physically), but the single transfer to acetate or polyester stock saved it for a very long time. If nothing else, you can hold the film up to the light and see the images and anyone could construct a projector, if needed. Of course our curse of obsolescence is well appreciated and the only solution offerred is constantly transferring to the latest media (or transferring it to film). But that maintains only material that is NOW recognised as worth the trouble and cost. All else will be lost. Folk records (home movies, ordinary docos (corp videos, news, sports, ordinary events) will be lost to future generations.

TorS wrote on 10/15/2006, 11:11 PM

Then again, almost certainly, people will find ways to make money by transfering your obsolete material to the media of the now. The question is: Will future generations really want to see the stuff we make.
Tor

farss wrote on 10/15/2006, 11:24 PM

This is a subject I'm rather interested in as I do a bit fair bit of archival retrieval and that can pose some interesting challenges. At least once I've bought the material back to life it goes out on archival grade media. Just if anyone will have the kit to read the data in 300 years I really can't say but then again it's pretty amazing what we can read off 'records' from millions of year ago.
Perhaps CD players will not be something you could pickup in the local shops in a few decades but then again those who want to are still able to play wax cylinders and wire recordings. We've still got 2" VTRs running and no doubt in 100 years if someone needed to play a 2" quad tape the gear to do it could be built although somehow I have my doubts about the media surviving, most of it's in pretty sad condition already.

Now anyone know where I can get a cheap Dolby B decoder?
I can handle Dolby A and Dolby SR, but not B.

Bob.

Jonathan Neal wrote on 10/16/2006, 12:02 AM

These are real color photographs, not colorized, they are genuine Tournassoud colour photos.

http://www.tournassoud.org/: I believe has, literally, hundreds of these colour photos! Click here for an English translation of the page.

Xander wrote on 10/16/2006, 4:17 AM

I just finished scanning in some family negatives that turn 100 years old Nov 07. Wasn't easy as they are medium to large format sepia negatives. However, the quality was excellent. At least I know they are presserved for now.

I do think people will be interested to see what we were up to all those years ago, so there will always be historians. They will have a hard time though as every Tom, Dick and Harry takes picture and video footage now - no meteadata though.

birdcat wrote on 10/16/2006, 5:24 AM

Serena -

Going OT on an OT - If you need to read VAX tapes, let me know - I may be able to help you (we just replaced all the VAX's with Alpha's only a couple of years ago). The only thing I think we can't read are DECtapes.

Bruce

Serena wrote on 10/16/2006, 6:12 AM

Bruce, thanks for the marvellous offer, but I'm afraid those tapes were dumped when it was said that absolutely no facilities existed anymore. Of course that was in this country and the matter was complicated by it being classified aircraft data, which limited the places we could use. Yes, the classification lasted longer than the facilities to read the data, which sounds odd but not unusual. We should have had it copied when warned, but we thought that particular stuff wasn't needed any more for our particular project. So that incident came to mind when I started talking about preserving digitised history --only that which somebody believes to be important, at the right time, is likely to be available to later generations, historians included.

Serena

John_Cline wrote on 10/16/2006, 7:51 AM

Bob,

Teac made a stand-alone Dolby "B" encoder/decoder, the model was the AN-180. I have one here in the office that I use occasionally to decode 1/4" 2-track audio material that I encoded back in my Dolby "B" days before I started using dbx type 1 and 2.

John