Scanning and printing old photos on computers.......

A friend of mine had a photography business for about 35 years. When home printers started to get popular, he noticed that prints from various printers would start to fade after just a couple of years. He decided to find out why. In prints from a conventional photo lab, the dyes that create the print are in an emulsion. The layers of the emulsion (each color is a separate layer) provide some protection from ultraviolet light, but the UV, heat, and humidity will still fade the print over time. Prints in a frame fade slower because glass helps block UV rays. Simple computer printers put the inks on the top of the paper and no protection from UV is provided. Heat also breaks down the inks used in inkjet printers and the print will fade even when there's no light. The life of an inkjet print averages about 5 years. After that, the ink will start to fade either from UV or heat. Dye sublimation printers (much more expensive than standard computer printers) put down one layer of dye at a time and top that with a layer of plastic. The plastic adds some UV protection, but not a lot. The best thing you can do is put the images on an archival CD or DVD, but be sure it's truly archival. Standard CD and DVD's will also deteriorate after 5 to 10 years. The metal layer will corrode and the CD or DVD will be useless. Archival CD's and DVD's cost a lot more (the metal layer contains gold to prevent corrosion), but they're guaranteed for a lot longer than CD and DVD players will be around. This brings up my last bit of advice. Copy your prized data to new technology when the old technology starts to fade. CD's are still around in their original state for now, but DVD's are changing. The old DVD's are being replaced by BluRay and HD-DVD. One of the two will replace the existing DVD system. Make sure the DVD's you create today will still be usable by your grandkids. In the year 1086 (or thereabouts) the Domesday Project was created. It was a complete census of England and everything was documented. Everthing was written on Vellum and is still usable. It was recently preserved and copied, but it lasted over 950 years. In 1986 the Doomsday Project was started. It lasted less that 20 years. An attempt was made to recreate the success of the original project, but everything was stored on Laserdisc. When the keepers of the data realized that laserdisc was obsolete, it took a while to find enough players to transfer all of the data. Players had to be purchased from various sources in various states of repair and refurbished so that the contents of the original discs could be transferred to newer technology. That technology is DVD's. Hopefully, steps are being taken to keep the media up to date. If not, in 20 years, the keepers of the data may find themselve scrambling to find enough DVD players to transfer the data to the latest and greatest system.

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