CD photo quality

[fztwenty]

I am going to be travelling and would like to know if I will lose any photo quality by transferring my photo's to CD en route to free up my sd cards for more photo's.I will be taking some tiffs and some jpegs.Probably a silly question but it's all new to me.

[genece]

I have not noticed any loss by writing to a CD or DVD.
One other suggestion that may or may not work for you is a digital wallet, such as.


http://www.memorylabs.net/xsdriivpdrin.html


You can get one with a 40 gb hard drive for less than 150 bucks.
One other thing ..consider passing on the TIFFs. Not much if any advantage.




.

[kuroneko]

Hei... its digital world..
whatever the media.. as long the file is the same. it has the same quality!

Dont worry!..
i transferred my pic (mostly scraps).. to the DVD .. without worryness!

[fnoel]

Hey the only silly question or dumb one is the one you don't ask. I wish I had known about this forum a year and a half ago when I took my family to California. I lost a whole memory card of pictures of the Grand Canyon and other sights on the trip. When I got home I had four memory cards filled and then burned them to a cd and am still able to enjoy them. No loss of quality by doing this either.

[tim11]

You can download as you want and make duplicates all you need without losing quality AS LONG AS you DON'T reduce the size of the pictures with computer programs. The only worry, though not often, is CDs that you use to keep the photos can fail. I suggest you make 2 CD copies of whatever are important pictures.

[kuroneko]

agreed with tim11.. always 2 copies.. never 1 copy.. for important pic! :D

[emalvick]

Might I also suggest that you check your photo CD's at somewhat regular intervals (e.g. once a year). CDR's are not infinite. While some are better than others they will all fail at some point. That is why 2 copies are good, and a periodic check is good. Good quality CD's are also good to have, and backing up on a website can also be good.

Erik

[bracko]

Hei... its digital world..
whatever the media.. as long the file is the same. it has the same quality!

Dont worry!..
i transferred my pic (mostly scraps).. to the DVD .. without worryness!

every time you put a file such as a photo through the CPU and copy/save/open it, there will be data loss.

yes i am aware it's a realisticly small and the chances of corupting a file due to opening it is slim. however the chance is there.

your CPU has fan noise, heat deflection, and other losses through processing. this is why you will find that most professional graphic designer, as any electronic music producer will only allow quality heat syncs, fans and PCI cards for their editing needs.

[Balrog]

Electronic music professionals only use quality stuff because music is inherently an analog signal .. same goes for graphic designers working on huge CRTs ... the video signal is analog at the final stage.
Electrical interference can and will degradge analog signal quality. Bit errors in digital files, on the other hand, are for one much much more difficult (since there's essentially just a high voltage and a low voltage, and the difference between them is too much to be messed up by noise most of the time), and for another are guarded against using checksums and other error-correction methods.
Simply copying a file and saving it somewhere else will NOT cause any degradation, as long as the media is ok.

[bracko]

in practice you're basically right.

in theory there is potential to loose data while moving through the CPU and any cables that are close to the PSU or fan due to an inducted current if cables are not shielded is there.

but as i posted initially, this is not something to worry the average computer user.

[emalvick]

One can use a makesum generator to compare original and final files... I do this all the time when archiving files. I've never had a loss like suggested. The usual error I get is much more severe and random (from screen-saver or skip in the cd drive or a bad blank). The program I use, which is worth trying out, generates files with an md5 extension I believe... I wish I could remember the name off hand....

Ok... after a little looking, it is called MD5summer. You can find it at:

http://www.md5summer.org/

It is a good resource for creating a key based on the files you are putting on a CD. You then put that file on the CD too and you can check to be sure the CD files match those on the hard-drive. It is useful for any files, so I use it for backing up my photos, my music, and my research... Great to have, and it is OpenSource = Free!

Erik