Dead Scottie on your shuttle is clearly not as useful as alive Scottie on your shuttle.

Bigger is better, right?

We have a couple of the hardware encrypted drives at work for testing. We have seen no overhead on the drives. They encrypt constantly. Even during an initial OS install. The only thing the software does for the drive is allow you to configure the authentication. They appear to be a good alternative to software whole disk encryption for any users who have issues with the overhead of software based encryption. We only have two drives, so I'm not sure how painful management will be long term.

Gotta love the full frame goodness. Even being a Canon shooter (5D owner) I am very happy Nikon has taken the important step of a full frame sensor.

Never used a 1D series camera huh? They have monster batteries.

No cable card.

DirecTV HD

BSG in HD, so so nice.

D W you missed the point of my comment. What I’m saying is that digital data on its own is easy to migrate to new storage media. Not that many years later the original digital media is usable. Perhaps a real world example is needed.

Say you have a nice large raid and as it’s used over a period of time, it gets filled. The way the storage industry is going when it’s full or reaching the end of its useful life, you will be able to move that data off of that onto a newer higher capacity raid. After the migration you will have faster storage with more capacity and media with a useful life again. Who cares what happens to the old raid, the data has been copied without loss to the new raid.

I’m also not suggesting that analog media should be converted to digital. While there may be advantages in scanning a few slides for a specific purpose, there is little motivation to digitize an entire collection at the highest resolution. Regardless any scanning will lose data sine there is a conversion involved. There is no conversion involved in migrating data from one storage media to another.

As for film staying around longer because people delete files. That’s really a non issue. You can throw away film as easily as deleting photos. You can also save digital files for later use. That’s more of a workflow question than a Digital vs Analog question.

I’m sure trying to deal with your 8mm analog video tapes is annoying. Were that digital, you could have migrated it to another media type and not been dependant on a now outdated and unavailable media type.

While old film may be recovWhile old film may be much more recoverable than equally old digital storage media, you are ignoring digital data’s best trait: it can migrate to new media with no loss of quality. Good luck getting data off a 10 year old 3.5” floppy. However if that data has been migrated to new storage media as it was made available (like moving a document archive to a new hard drive as you install a new computer) getting at that data is as simple as opening it as any other file.

If anything, the real concern is not can the data survive, but can you interpret the data at a much later date. As file formats progress support for older formats is depreciated and eventually removed. I think this is a small concern at best.

As for the comment about picking up EF glass. Canon has shown their ongoing support for full format digital sensors. They have made three digital cameras (two currently available) that have sensors that are the full size of the original film media (24mm x 36mm). They also have a limited crop (the 1Dmk2 and 1Dmk2n) Pro bodies that also only can use EF glass. In fact every camera they call Pro only uses EF glass. I fully expect to see more EF glass that as good or better than any of the L glass currently available.