New claims for optical media

Re: Tim Vitale's excellent query (Conservation DistList Instance:
22:33 Saturday, December 6, 2008): It has been a long time coming,
but there finally is a *standard* for a test method for determining
the estimated lifetime of optical media. No Kidding.

    Information technology
    Digitally recorded media for information interchange and storage
    Test method for the estimation of the archival lifetime of
    optical media

It is an ISO/IEC Standard 10995 which was published on April 15,
2008.

It is a tribute to the tenacity of Dr. Peter Adelstein of the Image
Permanence Institute and a stalwart group of volunteers that this
exists at all. It is an excellent document that has been thoroughly
vetted, well thought out, and extremely informative. I can assure
you that the document is informative and will provide good
information with which to evaluate manufacturers claims. Even more
importantly there is now a standard by which to test them!

The document was prepared with the co-operation of a virtual
Alphabet Soup of organizations including JTC and ECMA and I will not
bore you with all of the Acronyms of those involved..... suffice it
to say that this has been a long time coming and a great deal of
time and expertise was involved in creating it.

So--you wanna know the performance of a manufacturer's media
relative to a real Standard as opposed to marketing claims? Well
call them and ask them how their media performs according to the ISO
10995 standard--and expect a stunned silence.

Yes, you have to buy it--from those nice people at ISO--well worth
the money.

    <URL:http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=46554>

Jim Lindner
Media Matters LLC.
SAMMA Systems Inc.
450 West 31st Street 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Fax 646-349-4475
Mobile: 917-945-2662
212-268-5528


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 22:35
                 Distributed: Monday, December 8, 2008
                       Message Id: cdl-22-35-006
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