I would like to comment on your reviews of photo printers.

In the past you bought a roll of film, took your pictures and then had them all developed, generally discarding only the worst. With the widespread shift from film to digital photography, you now download the images from your camera to your PC and then print only the best, saving yourself from
storing large numbers of paper photographs.

You will of course still have the digital files archived away, but in many ways digital files are more vulnerable than printed images - many of us have experienced hard drive crashes or corruptions of our storage media. When this happens you are likely to lose a large part, if not all, of your photo
collection. Moreover, the file and storage formats we use today are popular, but where will they be a century or more from now? Unless you and your ancestors go through the expensive and time-consuming process of periodically migrating your archives to the technologies of the day you risk
the chance of them eventually becoming obsolete.

This is where printed images score over their digital counterparts, and why it is important that they are as permanent as possible. In our rush to embrace digital recording systems, we run the risk of large amounts of everyday history being unavailable to future generations. Therefore in your reviews of photo printers, I would like to see a rating for the longevity of the prints produced by these printers and their consumables. I realize that simulating aging is a difficult task, but having seen how quickly images have faded from the photos produced by some inkjet printers I feel that more emphasis should be placed on this subject.

This does of course open a much wider debate about the digital storage of all types of information....

Chris Crawshay