There are two comments we should learn from this story. I've advocated them for years and I've been dismayed that even professional photographers and those in t

There are two comments we should learn from this story. I've advocated them for years and I've been dismayed that even professional photographers and those in the imaging/scanning business don't advocate them as mantra thus they haven't become common practice. First, don't ever throw your slides or film negatives away as you may need them again (if you're sure you'll never want them again then give them to relatives or failing that to those who collect and archive old photos). If you have scanned them then pack them away sealed from dust, dirt, high humidity and high temperatures. Second, if you are scanning negatives or slides then never skimp on the resolution, if you do and you no longer have the originals you can't rescan them for more detail (the large size of high resolution scans is not an issue these days). The classic error many make is they scan say a school or army platoon photo at low or medium resolution and it looks OK on the screen, later when they have to select an individual from the group and need to enlarge the image it's too pixelated to use. (It's very disconcerting for say a family who has lost a soldier in war and they can't recover his photo.) A Kodachrome slide under good conditions has a limiting resolution of around 100 lines/mm and a 35mm negative or slide is 24x36mm which means the scanned image has to have at least a horizontal resolution of 3600 pixels to extract all the picture information. 100 lines/mm resolution means you need set your scanner to at least 2500 px per inch. In fact, ideally you should scan at double that rate to allow for the Nyquist factor—like your audio CDs which sample at 44kHz to get 20kHz audio reproduction, you should do the same with photo scans. Sometimes, scanning at the Nyquist rate (here, 5000 px per inch) can be difficult so you should set the scanner to as high resolution as is practicable). Even today, scanning is fraught with problems that remain unclear to many. As mentioned, the biggest is the lack of information and I blame the professionals for not adequately informing the public. The next is the lack of good scanners and it's a big problem—and Kodachrome slides have special requirements when scanned. Ideally, slides should be scanned at a color depth of more than the standard 8 bits per channel (24-bit) to stop color banding in sky areas. (Banding shows up as annoying discontinuities in colors that are close but range over a gentle gradient such as sky areas and it's caused by insufficient bits). Kodachrome has enough color dynamic range to make banding obvious. Banding is stopped by going to 48-bit color depth but unfortunately many scanners cannot support it (hence my comment about the lack of good scanners). It's also an excellent reason why you should keep your original slides and negatives. Also, Kodachrome slides are particularly difficult to scan because they are intrinsically different to other color films in that they contain residual silver and this throws the scanning out. The better scanners allow for this and they also come with specialized software to overcome the problem.