Kodak have just announced they are discontinuing Kodachrome colour film. The Daily Telegraph “Digital cameras kill Kodachome slides” quotes the company as saying customers prefer to capture images with newer technology
The Company’s wesbite has this link: http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=15359&pq-locale=en_GB
Following on the earlier demise of the Kodak Carousel projector (although mine still works) this announcement is the formal marker of the end of an era. which started 74 years ago.
Now we are all going digital, we need to think very carefully about two connected issues.
1 careful and clear labelling of all those slides worth keeping (now would be a good time to sort them out) and consider scanning those that are well worth retaining.
2 ensure you have at least one good backup of your digital photos and keep checking they are accessible. If you take lots of photos spend some time considering how you name the best ones and deleting the rubbish!
The Mills Archive has already been given thousands of slides of mills and, although we are happy to accept collections, we are unlikely ever to have enough cash to digitise them all (it costs us about 30p per slide) so we prefer well organised, clearly labelled donations!
We have three backups of our images. This “overkill” was recently jusitfied as one of our external hard drives died on us.