My wife and I are seriously considering making the leap to digital photography and eventually ditching our regular film cameras. While there is tons of information on what camera to buy for what purposes, my biggest barrier to going digital is the “processing” and I can’t find an answer to this question…
I understand that I can still take my pictures to a professional place just like I do with my film camera now, but I have a good printer at home, and photo paper is pretty cheap at Costco and Walmart, so I’m inclined to print the pictures myself. My question is, do these pictures stand up to the test of time? If I print them and stick them in a photo album, are they going to be terribly faded 10 years from now relative to my film pictures? Is there a site that has any information about this where they’ve tested these photo papers?
I understand part of my question is dependent on the type of printer, photo paper, and specific storage conditions of the pictures, but I just want to print the pictures and be done with them. I’m not the kind of guy who is going to store all my shots on CD and re-print everything 10 years down the road if it fades. So if fading is a big problem upfront, I want to know now and save myself the grief.
Epson Photo Stylus printer inks, the new versions that is, are supposed to be fade free for 50 or 75 years. There’s a company Whilhelm something that tests inks and papers via an accellerated aging test.
Digital cameras are still great, just because you can take as many digital photos as you want (or at least, as many as you have media for), do as little or as much as you want to them yourself in an image editor, and then print–or have printed–only the ones you know you like. A 2-megapixel camera is no big deal these days, and (at full-resolution) takes photos that print as well as a cheap 35mm camera would.
At the extreme ends of it, there are still technical and artistic tasks that film is best at–but for casual snapshots, digital is easily the more practical choice. And besides, if you have stored digital copies of the photos, you can just get them re-printed later on if you need to.
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Ditto. I expect consumer level printers to make great advances in the coming years. If a printed photo does fade, simply print a new one. This is of course assuming you keep them backed up. I know you said you don’t want to reprint ten years down the road, but do you really want to print out every photo you take?
When I first started out with digital photography, I splurged and bought a (at the time) top-of-the-line HP Photosmart printer. It was great, but as time went on I found myself using it less and less. I still took as many (in my mind) great pictures, but I found the need to print them out decrease. Instead, I make photo albums on my computer, share pictures by email, and put them on webpages for the world to see. I don’t feel the need to print out each and every photo. And the costs associated with printing your own can be great.
I have albums and albums (and boxes) full of film pictures that I never even look at - keeping them on my computer is the way to go. The key is organizing them so you can find any given photo quickly.
Yarster, this very thought occured to me when I first got a digital camera. I did some research online, and came across one very interesting site (can’t seem to find it now). It was the homepage of a guy who hand makes heirloom guality doll’'s houses. It was a matter of concern to him because he had moved to printing the wall paper for them on his inkjet, and was concerned that the “wallpaper” would still be legible in the hundreds of years he fully expects his products to survive. He’d researched it with inkjet manufacturers, and they expected their inks to have a lifespan of betwwen 75-150 years. (He considered this borderline, and warned customers about it and offered them the option of conventionally printed wallpaper at a higher cost).
I considered that kind of marginal…I have family photographs from 1902, which is approaching the upper end of that timeframe. So I still get significant photos printed professionally.
One other point you might want to consider is the importance of backing up your photos … imagine how sick you’ll be if you lose 2 decades of photos to a failed hard disk. I burn a CD with a backup copy of mine every week … and make 2 copies of important ones.
1: In practical terms the question is kind of beside the point as others have noted, in that you can simply pop off another copy in the year xxxx+ on Fuji synthoplastic holosheets or Kodak diamond coated lithoquad that will last until the sun goes dark.
FWIW the color pics I printed on photo paper about 10-13 years ago on an HP Deskjet 500 series printer are still perfectly fine.
My digital prints that are on Epson paper and using HP printing ink do not last long if they are in the indirect sunlight or flourescent light. If they are in a photo album I’m sure they would last longer. You can now get 4 X 6 photos from Ofoto for $.29 and that is almost as cheap as the ones that you print. Printing them at home is still fun though.