[Note:  In the interest of full disclosure, we must confess that Phil & Otto are sometimes recognized as their alter egos Randy Fredlund and Joe Manico]

Otto: Perfesser, I have a question to challenge that fancy science degree of yours that impoverished your parents.  Why have electronics based "motion imaging" gismos like video cameras been around since the last millennium, while only recently we've had those digital "still imaging" gismos that seem like something reverse-engineered from Area 51

 

Ancient video camera and weight training device

Area 51 refugee KODAK EASHSHARE V705

Phil: Well my unlettered friend, it has to do with light.  There is no limit to the lack of light in the universe.

Otto: Or lack of baloney!  If you don't know the answer, just say so and repay your parents so that they can retire to someplace warm.

Phil: Mom and Dad love both Oscar Mayer and the change of seasons.  Regardless, I'll try to make it simple enough for you to understand.  For years, consumer analog video cameras have captured video at NTSC resolution and recorded those signals on tape.

Otto: N-T-S-C?  Not Too Super Camera?  Nobody Trusts Siamese Cats?  Never Taste Slimy Cooking?

Phil: Or Never The Same Color!  That's an old engineering joke, and a good one.  Actually it stands for National Television System Committee, which was established by the Federal Communications Commission in 1940.  This group was responsible for determining what signal would be broadcast so that our analog TV sets could receive them.  Fascinating signal.  A triumph of engineering!

Otto: Maybe fascinating to pointy-headed Perfessers, but of little interest to the followers of the Simpsons.

Phil: Perhaps you are correct.  But the efforts of television engineers like Vladimir Zworykin and Philo T. Farnsworth have saved you from pressing your ear up to the Victrola to hear Homer shout "Doh!"  You and the masses of Homer wanna-bees care little for them or Georges Valensi's brilliantly backward compatible use of the 3.58 Megahertz carrier to introduce color to the airwaves, yet you are happy to enjoy the donuts..er ah..fruits of their labors.

Otto: Doesn't phase me a bit, pal.  But as usual, you've changed the channel.  We were talking about camcorders.

Phil: Yes, yes, my friend.  Because the NTSC signal was a broadcast signal, its use of bandwidth had to be limited.

Otto: What does the distance from the lead singer to the base player have to do with anything?

Phil:  Bandwidth has everything to do with it, if you want to see them both in good focus.  Though it was analog, the television signal was limited to channels with a specified resolution of 4.2 Megahertz.  Grossly oversimplifying, the digital equivalent of this limit is about 440 by 484 pixels.

Otto: What are you talking about?  Everyone knows that VGA is 640 by 480.

Phil: Slow down, my anachronistic friend.  We're talking about a system created in the 40s, and VGA is an 80's computer standard.

Otto: And why would the computer geeks go to all the trouble of doing something different?

Phil: That's another long story, so suffice to say there were some issues with text and interlace and our old friend flicker.

Otto: Who'da thought those geeks cared about an old movie about a horse?

Phil: Reigning this discussion back in, 440 by 484 comes out to be less than 250,000 pixels.

Otto: 250,000 pixels?  I'd never want a camera with only that many pixels.

Phil: Well, then how about 2 Meg?  That's about how many pixels are in a frame of 1080p HD video.

Otto: Maybe 3 years ago.  No way that would cut it now.  I just bought a beautiful little 12Meg job with digital zoom.  And everything digital is better!

Phil: Not always a good assumption with zoom.  Digital zoom can be useful, but you're really throwing pixels away.

Otto: What?  Throwing pixels away?  You can never have too many pixels.

Phil:  Well, yes, you can, and that's exactly why digital still cameras appeared so much later than video cameras.  Since video only needed 400K pixels to match the TV standard, those pixels could be big and collect a lot of photons.  Or more correctly, the vidicon tubes of yesteryear needed less resolution than a still camera.  Still cameras, like digits on the other hand, need more pixels to create a decent picture, so for the same size sensor, the pixels had to be much smaller.  Correspondingly, their ability to collect photons was much less.  And until recently, it was not possible to create an economical sensor with enough pixels and light sensitivity for decent still imaging.

 

Otto: Wait just an atomically-clocked second, Mr. See-it-all.  Video looks good on my TV.  So why can't I just grab a picture out of a video.

Phil: Good thought, my prehensile friend.  The answer is, "Yes, you can," but you won't like it very much.  In fact, both Sony and Canon brought out cameras that did just that back in the 80s.  They captured a field of analog video and stored it on a two inch floppy disk. But they were not embraced by the marketplace. 

Otto: Were there problems?

Phil: Let's just say that they were a bit ahead of the marketplace - the value they provided for the price was somewhat less than what the customer demanded.  You see, the video system takes full advantage of the fact that our eyes and visual system are very forgiving when viewing a moving image.  So you can get away with a lot of inaccuracies in video that would be objectionable in a still image.  HD helps, but the issue doesn't go away.

Otto: OK, OK.  So you are saying that video pixels are big and there aren't so many of them, but that's OK 'cause motion covers up the need for lots more pixels like in a still camera?  And this is all because of the unlimited lack of light in the universe?

Phil: Yes, brave Photon!  You are enlightened!

[Note: This is the first installment in a continuing series. Phil and Otto have been writing about imaging for quite awhile now. They are sometimes recognized as their alter egos Randy Fredlund and Joe Manico.]

Where pictures go to die - all the pictures you could never find in yesterday's shoebox.

Phil: A friend of mine brought me an old disk the other day. He couldn't read it.

Otto: What was the problem? Was it a Frisbee printed in German?

Phil: No, No, it was a CD. A 'Photo CD'. He couldn't read the images on it.

Otto: You need to take good care of media if you want it to last. I'll bet he scratched the heck out of it, didn't he? CD's should never be used as beer coasters, unless they provide 1,000 hours of free Internet service.

Phil: No, not at all. It seems that the application he was using did not recognize the image file format. I opened the disk with a different program, and presto! the images appeared. So I converted them to JPEGs and burned him a new disk.

Otto: So life is good! Problem solved. You are once again hero to the common man.

Phil: Well, maybe for the moment.

Otto: What do you mean?

Phil: What happens when the applications no longer read JPEGs?

Otto: Oh come on. They'll always read JPEGs. The JPEG file format is the cornerstone of the Digital Imaging Universe. He'll always be able to read them.

Phil: Mixed metaphor aside, do you mean that they'll be just like the family albums you had transferred to Betamax tape?

Otto: Unfair! That was different. The Betamax is an archaic analog format from the last millennium, and it was not an open standard like JPEG. Other manufacturers decided they would also like to be in the game, so they created the more open and slightly inferior VHS format, which was the winner in the marketplace, for Beta or for worse. JPEG is a DIGITAL open standard format, free for all to use and enjoy. It provides perfect digital copies and it will be supported forever. Besides, if it is surpassed by an even better format I can always convert my files without losing any quality.

Phil: Put down the sitar and stop humming Kumbaya. Which episodes of The Simpsons are you going to miss so that you can spend countless boring hours converting files???

Otto: The Simpsons? Sorry, I need my culture. Maybe I need to have someone do it for me.

Phil: Don't you mean 'pay' to have someone do it for you? When is the last time you paid anyone to do anything for you? And remember, you'll have to convert all your images. When did you start using digital images?

Otto: Including the pictures I downloaded for my essay on accurate skin tone reproduction of lovely subjects?

Phil: No, I mean your FAMILY pictures. You know, the ones you show at family get-togethers.

Otto: Hmmm... That was about 3 computers ago.

Phil: And you still have all your images?

Otto: Well, yeah, except for the ones that disappeared when one of my hard drives died. But ever since then, I've backed everything up to CD. They'll always be there in my 500+ CD image library.

Phil: You sure?

Otto: Of course. My Pictures are safe and sound forever on CDs.

Phil: I don't think so. You've got a couple of problems. First, like with my friend's disk, whatever file format you've stored them in won't be around forever. As new and better formats become available, the old ones fall by the wayside, no matter how popular they are now. Next, there is a media format problem. Have you read any images off 5.25" floppy disks lately? Can't do it, can you, 'cause you don't have the drive.

Otto: You mean like how many bagels won't fit in my old 2-slice toaster?

Phil: Ahem . . . and then there is the problem with the media itself, or "CD rot". Sooner or later, it will fail. Nothing lasts forever, and more importantly, nothing lasts as long as originally thought.

Otto: Are you telling me my CDs are toast?

Phil: Could be. Even if you could access all of your images, they still would be nearly useless.

Otto: I'm guessing you're going to tell me why.

Phil: You bet. Your images will be useless because you can't find the ones you want.

Otto: Huh? I store them all in dated folders. No problem.

Phil: In ten years, are you going to remember the date of the party where you were wearing that lampshade on your head?

Otto: I couldn't remember that party the next morning.

Phil: Let me tell you, 10 years won't make your memory any better. You'll have thousands of images on many, many disks. And you won't even know which disk to look for.

Where pictures go to die - all the pictures you can never find in today's shoebox.

Otto: So how am I going to pass on to my future great-grandchildren that fabulous shot of Pickles and Sugar?

Phil: You want to pass on pictures of food?

Otto: My wife and dog, wise guy.

Phil: I won't ask which is which. You have only one alternative it you want to preserve your legacy. You'd better get it printed, my friend.

Otto: OK, great. I'll run right out and get some reloaded ink cartridges and a ream of copier paper, fire up the inkjet printer!

Phil: And you better rent a warehouse to store all those pictures in. Never mind. Just leave your pictures on the disks. Forget I ever said anything about them.

Otto: Too late. I feel an obsession starting to take hold. What about one of those on-line sites? Those images are on professionally maintained servers, buried in deep underground, nuclear-hardened bunkers. They will be around forever, right?!?

Phil: Yeah and they will happily store your terabyte of snapshots of your dog forever, for free, and the Tooth Fairy will guarantee it.

Otto: Tooth Fairy huh? As mythological creatures go I would prefer one less interested in cash transactions. Any other ideas on what I can do with my digital images?

Phil: Of course, and you may even find some of them useful. The first is the absolutely safest method available for archiving your digital images for the long haul. The data storage technique will last and be 'readable' for over 100 years unless the electromagnetic spectrum or human sight changes. This technique will require some cash and some storage space, but as long as YOU can read, YOU can read these images. Have your digital files printed at your local digital minilab that uses high quality paper and chemicals like the sign in the window says. All you have to do is drop off your brand new gigabyte SD card and your well-worn credit card and say, "print them." Let's say at $0.20 per image and you can on average store 500 digital images per gigabyte that's $100 per gigabyte for image storage. Throw in another buck for a plastic shoebox (don’t use a real shoebox, cardboard is not waterproof) and voila! You have an image archive that will be all but immune to the ravages of time. And if you want to be really safe, be sure to get doubles for storage under Ayer's Rock in Australia. Never can tell when a comet might hit one of the hemispheres.

Otto: Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK but a 4' x 6' print just won't do it. If I get 300 pixels per inch digital prints, and I'm being generous, that's only - uh hold on while I consult my slide rule - only 1.2K by 1.8K. That's too small for my professional quality images. I'm sure that this is fine for amateur snap shooters like you, but I need more resolution.

Phil: I'm sure that you need to have a lot of things resolved. You could print 8x10s, or maybe try my second idea. This technique will cost more and is harder to find but is archival and high resolution. Find a commercial photo lab and have your digital images written to film or slides. Prices will start at least $1.50 per image and climb fast, but the images are eye readable and will be far into the distant future. Once in the future, even if the last film scanner has gone the way of the wooly mammoth, any futuristic wiz bang digital camera with a macro mode will work well as a film or slide scanner. Slides are best, since they are individually mounted and are not "negative."  If you choose negatives, spend the extra bucks for index prints or contact sheets to help find the images you are looking for, unless you naturally see colors in reverse. Don't worry about inverting the negative images. I'm sure PhotoShop Version 44.3 will be able to handle it.

Otto: A buck and a half per image!!! I don't need THAT much resolution. Any other ideas?

Phil: The first two aren't good enough for you? Then try this technique, even though it has an uncertain future because it's digital. That's right, use DVD, the penultimate computer and home electronic Ãœber-format. Since DVD is a "digital format and media," it is by its very nature a passing fad. But don't let that stop you. Find the most archival, and quite likely the most expensive DVD media available and write your full resolution images to it or pay your local full service photo specialty shop to do it for you. Now take the DVD and make copy of it. Put one copy in your safe deposit box and put the other in a nitrogen atmosphere hermetically sealed heavy-duty plastic container along with a brand new DVD player. Bury it all in the plot you have reserved at Riverview Cemetery. The plot will cost a few bucks, but even so, this is by far the cheapest method. But it may also be the shortest term. Remember Betamax. I doubt DVD will be the format of choice when reach your "golden years." So somewhere along the way you will have to dig up your container and transfer your digital images to whatever the future digital format is. I wouldn't be surprised if rat brain cells in a holographic matrix become the data storage method of choice.

Otto: Wow. My head hurts. Do you have the Tooth Fairy's phone number?

Phil: Just leave your SD card and a major credit card under your pillow tonight and I'm sure he will call you.