RE: [AV Media Matters] Incubation services search

[Charles Repka <Charles.P.Repka@abc.com>]

Thanks for your informative reply.  Your reasons for making the
tests you do make perfect sense.  But having worked as an engineer
for several consumer electronics manufacturers in the past I have
seen how the Sales department will take honest data from the
engineer dept. and warp it to fit their own perceived needs.  I
realize that not all companies do this but it is very hard sometimes
to separate real data from Sales hype.  I did not intend to
disparage the work done by Kodak.  My apologies if I offended you.
I have not made pollutant tests of my own.  I do not have the
necessary equipment or knowledge.  I'm just an engineer who like to
ask questions.

Charles Repka

>From: Joseph J. Wrobel
>
>Charles,
>
>I don't recall Kodak ever doing pollutant exposure testing of CD-R media,
>other than with things like coffee spills or greasy fingers. Four reasons
>come to mind.
>
>First, most of our experience has been with gold.  In a gold disc, the only
>component you worry about interacting with a polluted environment is the
>dye, and it's sitting there between an impermeable metal film and 1.2 mm of
>polycarbonate.  Those are substantial barriers to environmental gases.
>Granted, with silver, it's different.
>
>Second, in our experience, it's way down the list of ways consumers can
>lose their data.  We worried primarily about light exposure (which is why
>we chose a phthalocyanine dye over 10 years ago and still use it today) and
>handling (which is why we invented the Infoguard protection system).
>
>Third, when talking to archivists, we primarily heard concerns about data
>longevity in a controlled environment.  Who maintains an archive with high
>levels of pollutants?  So, we did an extensive Arrhenius study to estimate
>lifetime in that environment.
>
>Fourth, what would it prove?  After all the effort that went into our
>lifetime estimation work, I read over-and-over that it's just marketing
>hype, that it's not credible, yada yada yada.  If we came back with data
>that said our media could be boiled in a mixture of liquid sulfur and
>nitrogen oxides, I'm sure I'd hear that unless it was done by a third
>party, it's not believable.
>
>So I guess the question is, have you ever done any testing of CD-R media
>for exposure to sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other common air
>pollutants?  That might carry some weight.
>
>Joe Wrobel
>Eastman Kodak Company