Other manufacturers of CD-Rs have made the same tests and also guarantee a lifetime of about 100 years. The bigger problem for longtime storage is the format the pics are stored on the CD. If it is a propretiary format like a Photoshop format or even jpeg it might not be readable some decades later. If you want to be on the save side, either copy a program which can read the files on the CD or use the tiff format, which is a far as possible approved to be supported by most of the readers in the future. I work for a software comany which sells archiving software and we recommend tiff or pdf as a longtime format.
For my private use I copy a jpg version and a big tiff version on my CD and add irfanview as the reader program on the CD. Concerning the lifetime of slides or negatives. I found some slides which are about 45 years old. They were partly in bad shape but others had survived nicely. Also I have b&w prints from 1920 (earliest) and they are in a very good shape. Just my 2 cents Adelheid -----Original Message----- From: Steve Jolly [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Freitag, 2. Januar 2004 22:01 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Photodisks Failing Rob Studdert wrote: > If properly stored the media life should be far greater than 3-7 years. Kodak have done some pretty rigourous accelerated-aging studies on their own CDRs and came up with an estimate of 217 years average lifetime. A copy of the report is online at http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Kodak.html if anyone's interested. Kodak's (more conservative) official position is that "under normal storage conditions", Photo CDs should last for "100 years or more." Obviously the manufacturers of cheaper media won't have data lifetime quite as high on their list of priorities - the lifetime of unbranded budget CDRs is probably nothing like that... S
