Will your digital photos still be around for your grandchildren?

Recently there was a discussion of the quality of film versus digital media on PC World’s blog site: http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/001323.html

I have been using film cameras and computers since the 1960’s and here is my insight on this issue.

Let see now, you bought that great top of the line digital camera, stored the photos on the best quality CD/DVD money can buy and let’s say the CD/DVD is still good 50 years from now.

I still have a 35mm camera I bought in the early 70’s; I also have paper tape used to load Fortran (a popular programming language in the 70’s, all but dead now) on an early computer, guess which of these items still works. I have a slightly newer model camera from around 1980 and 8 inch floppy disks, again guess which of these items still works. I bought a still newer camera about the time 5.25 floppies were popular, I use the boxes from the 5.25 floppies to store my CD-R(s) in.

The point is that all my old digital media is all but useless just like that CD/DVD will be when your grandchildren try to find a device to load and read today’s digital storage media. Will film be surpassed in quality, most certainly? Will we be able to use what we stored from that digital camera 50 years from now is the big question.