I'm getting over a huge letdown -- like being told by the doctor that you have Alzheimer's with only a few years of lucidity left. Fortunately, I've nothing so dire. What brought me down was an NHK television news report on CD and DVD digital storage. I (and apparently many others) had taken for granted that we would be able to store recordings of art, music and videos of family events, eternally, in near pristine condition.
These recordings would never become scratchy, nor would they fade or develop blue-green color shifts that film and tape do. Well, forget pristine. What happens to disk-stored images and sound is a catastrophic meltdown.
A classic film buff whom I know invests considerable time and money collecting DVDs. He, along with many Japanese, takes great care archiving footage of family events -- precious recordings that were expected to last, if not forever, at least a lifetime. Perhaps at worst they would gracefully lose quality.
I haven't the heart to give him the prognosis. According to the report, disks have a life expectancy of 10 to 20 years. His collection will become an unreadable whirl of noise and mosaic images as will yours and mine. Is any one liable for this? No monetary figure will be able to compensate for the sense of loss when threads to many precious memories fray and disintegrate before our eyes and ears.
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