I'm wondering more about trade-offs than advantages. There's some real losses with digital.
For instance, CD-R media is showing itself non-durable, with some media only retaining data for a couple of years. Indexing systems are sparce, mostly inadequate. (I'm going to purchase a laptop this next month and create one -- a professional one. Finally. Period. $5,000. It's been designed but just not built & tested yet.) Few have reliable tape or CD-R backups installed. CD-R backup s/w for Win is about $50 & media is dirt cheap. Do it at least monthly. Weekly is better. DLT tapes don't cost that much and are practial as well. In that light I've designed an imaging system that accomplishes more than you could imagine. It's 24x36mm, holds 60 million pixels of information with unlimited color and gray-scale levels, the media lasts 50 to 150 years, take no hard drive space, are thinner than a potato chip, cost about 10 cents per image capture, and is retrieved by simple optical scan. 2 1/4" & larger cost more per image capture but all are handled in the same manner. Should have saved this for April 1. CRB
