Digital Decadence

When it comes to Photographic storage you have to think ahead.   I think the summary rule is store at the currently highest resolution you can, for in the future,  it will quite literally seem ridiculous.


Having spent (literally) a few thousand hours scanning all of our 35 mm slides, prints from our generation and back 2 generations,  I can review some statistics:


2003:  Slide scans from 128Kb to 3000KB, normally around 400KB


2004 Photographs 2GB


2005: Slide Scans: Higher resolution, average size about 600KB


2006: Slide Scans: Files 800KB plus on average


2008: Panasonic LX2   Average photograph 3MB


2008: Photographs 12GB for the year


2010: Panasonic LX3: Photograph size about 4MB


2011: Samsung Camera (20MP)  >7MB per photo


2011: Photographs  55GB year




Overall then, really Digital Decadence?  Well even in these flooded times a 3TB original Plus a 3TB Backup disk  will cost a total of about 1000CHF


So that is about 1000 * (3000 / 45*1.024 ) = 65 Francs per Year   (40 GBP, 70 USD)!


So what makes all this possible?


To play in the Digital Decadence club you are going to need

• A great Online Storage Facility = Google Storage for me.  The storage pool you buy can be used to populate your Blog, to store Google Documents, or save your Photoraphs (in Picasa)
• A camera that can shoot really large quality files.  A Canon EOS-1D full frame camera, or perhaps a Samsung NX-200  with an APS-C sized sensor  should you think 1.5Kg plus is ridiculous for a portable camera! (I do)
• A Good Blogging tool   - With Google Blogger you can click on the photographs to uncover the higher resolutions.  So  a summary resolution is displayed, and users click thru to get more.
• >10 Mbit/sec Internet download speed (cf 0.5Mbit/sec upload) . Well you need to upload your large photographs

So in summary, don't skimp on the resolution


Unrelated Links!
La Decadanse - In the days when smoking was cool !
Duran Duran - DecaDance