RE: Our responsibilty with Inkjet Printing

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<x-charset iso-8859-1>I am afraid that I think you have based your comments on a relatively narrow
viewpoint and experience.

1.  I do not think that anyone is really saying that "digital storage media
will fall apart sooner
than paper, and you won't be able to recover it later on."  If they are
saying thing it might be that digital media is as fragile and open to
degradation as anything else and that given the relatively quick changing
technologies today and the relatively quick and complete obsolescence of
hardware there may not be hardware around as some future date prior to any
migration of the files to newer media which can read the data on the older
media.  For example, I know of few SyQuest drives that are around today that
can read the SyQuest media of the past and they are disappearing fast.

What you say about migration to newer media and storage formats and
technologies is true in principle and ideally; but it is not practical in
all instances or for all users.  Some users (a) cannot afford the costs of
either keeping up with technology on a timely manner (since they may be poor
individuals and not either middle class professionals, employees of large
established institutions and corporations, or large institutions and
corporations themselves), (b) do not have the time, resources, or capacity
to be constantly upgrading and migrating their old files to newer
technologies as a large corporation or institution might especially if they
have accumulated a significant number of files, or (c) have the bad luck to
buy into the hardware or media upgrade cycle towards its end rather than at
the beginning of it and cannot afford the money or time to make the change
for the time being until a later date ( a couple of years later) if at all
so as to effectively result in their not going back and retrieving old files
for migration when they do get the newer hardware and storage media or do
make the attempt but much later when the older hardware is no longer
accessible or functional.

2.  The workflows you speak about are for large commercial and institutional
enterprises (or well known, famous, and highly successful individual artists
who are into mass marketing cheaper reproductions of their original
artworks) and not for small businesses, artists, and artisans.  They are not
for the serious part-time amateur or professional image maker who sells
their work to private individuals via small local venues at low to moderate
prices.  Moreover, many of those image makers are not merely business people
out to use are to make profit but persons who make prints that they want to
be of high quality and something to be proud of which involves having their
hands in the total process from creating the image through its reproduction
and printing. Even those who use traditional photo labs to make their prints
are inclined to either use customer labs to whom they are always in
communications with concerning the supplying of explicit directions and
instructions on how to print the image or who cannot afford the costs of
traditional custom photo labs and outside printers which is why they have
turned to inkjet printing in the first place so they can put out customized
work at an affordable cost to themselves ( even if in actuality this has not
been the case and the costs have been hidden but more expensive than they
thought).

3.  What you say about the stock photography market when you say, "The two
above already prove how a digital storage and workflow works in real-life -
i.e.. the stock photo market," may or may not be true; but we are not
talking only about the stock fine arts or photography market or even the
commercial ( use once for purposes of reproduction and throw it away) market
of commercial advertising, marketing, public relations, or publishing.  We
are talking about artists, photographers, and image makers who sell limited
quantities of prints (not rights to reproduce) of any particular image to
individuals who intend to display those images on their walls in their
homes, offices, or places of work, to give them as  moderately to long
lasting gifts to friends and relatives, or otherwise keep as keepsakes and
memorabilia.  Others among the sellers may be selling portraits, wedding or
special event, or historic keepsake photography to individuals who plan to
keep the for a long time as wall, dresser, or desktop displays or as
scrapbook and album heirlooms or memories of events, people, and objects
that have some personal or family significance.  In both cases longevity is
an issue; the buyer does not have access to the original or duplicate files
to reprint the purchased print or often the inclination to do so if they had
such access at an additional cost to them having paid for the print once.
Remember they bought a product ( the print of an image) not a license to
reproduce the image (reproduction rights).  The suppliers or sellers of
those prints on the other hand who has sold those prints does not want to
spend their future days reprinting old previously sold prints for free
rather than producing and selling newer images in terms of time spent; nor
do they want to incur the additional costs upon themselves of making the
reprints to replace those which deteriorated or faded.  They also do not
want to bear the storage and retrieval costs of maintaining an open
technologically up-to-date archive or library of older image files as
contrasted to a closed archive which may not be readily available and
accessible for retrieval for image files that will not be producing future
revenues at least at a level to pay for the costs of maintaining that
archive.

I think it must be remembered that this list membership includes not only
stock fine arts, photo and commercial artists but also full-time and
part-time professional printers, professional portrait and commercial
photographers of all varieties, as well as fine arts photographic
craftspersons who may display and sell their work publicly from restaurant
walls, storefront windows, or in arts and crafts fairs.  It also includes
the hobbyists who produce prints of their own images for their personal
pleasure and to give away to friends and family.  Their interests in
longevity are not all the same and nor are their abilities or desires to
maintain the most current up-to-date hardware and storage technologies.
What you have used as a grounds for your points is a limited universe for
which the statements may or may not be true; but its applicability to the
boarder real world universe is questionable at the very least.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com
[mailto:owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com]On Behalf Of chiendh@uci.edu
Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2000 1:05 AM
To: epson-inkjet@leben.com
Subject: Re: Our responsibilty with Inkjet Printing


1. The point isn't that digital storage media will fall apart sooner
than paper, and you won't be able to recover it later on.

As with anything 'important', you migrate it to newer media and
storage formats -before- the deterioration and obsolecence occurs.
Hopefully, with good luck and good backup practice, you should be able
to move those files in a decade or so to newer media/format w/o any bit
errors that cannot be corrected by the ECC and second/third copies of
the original files.

2. Eventually, I can see a larger company like Getty, which bought up
that poster printing company, taking care of the actual printing and
distribution someday.  After all, once we've gotten our workflows
properly calibrated and so forth to their printers, we only need to
select the desired printer, inks, output media, and so forth, and let
them take care of the messy stuff.  After all, isn't our goal to focus
on the creation of beautiful images - not sitting by a printer for hours
and hours for dozens of prints for our customers?

3. The two above already prove how a digital storage and workflow works
in real-life - ie. the stock photo market.  Now you certainly don't see
them complaining how they should go back to analog for longevity and
other reasons do you?  Digital works when you understand the limitations
and know how to work around them (limitations also exist in the analog
realm).  Instead, they've learned how to deal with the fragility of
digital storage media and simply make more backups and migrate in a
timely manner.  I'm sure we'll still see the same great stock images
appearing decades from now, perfect, intact, and the same as when we
first saw them today.

d =)


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