Aren't X-rays switching over to digital, too? Granted, it will take a long time to switch over all the equipment, but this still seems like a small victory in a losing war.

We use Z-Ray. Is two better than X.

/Futurama

Kudos to the headline writer!

/first laugh of the day

l.i.m.b.o.t.h.e.l.a.w: Kudos to the headline writer!

/first laugh of the day

...except you don't shake Kodak pictures, you shake Polaroid pictures.

I just had my x-ray done.... boy are my arms tired.

/polariod, kodak, whatever... headline still funny. Although I would have expected more irony.

I remember the last X-ray I had. It was a while after I tore up my shoulder and so I had it done at a clinic.

I sure felt safe when the X-ray tech went behind a 1 foot thick concrete wall into the booth while I just laid there on a table orientating my body for a few shots.

I know the safety of it all having worn radiation counters around cyclotrons and stuff so I realise the risks, but honestly. A 1 foot thick concrete wall seemed a bit excessive. I welcome the new film.

As for switching over to digital.... I don't know of any successful work done yet for a semiconductor sensor that does X-Ray for a doctor's office environment. Even then I know a lot of doctors would see no reason to switch when film is what they know and are comfortable with (a lot of doctors are older and have not in their prime vision, it's arguable that a film transparent version would better allow them to spot things).

Getting off topic. I still enjoy the excitement of having that roll of film in my camera for a few months and waiting for it to be developed. It's like a journal. I'm sure there are plenty of photographers out there to keep some kind of film business open. Nothing like silver film and the smell of a stop bath. I know journalists use those nice digital cameras so they can send all their stuff electronically. There are alot of advantages to digital such at PS contests you can't do with film.

I live in the hometown of Kodak, and I know a guy who developed a photo simply by dipping it in our river. They're a disgusting company.

I imagined this with a funnier headline.

udenjoe:

I still enjoy the excitement of having that roll of film in my camera for a few months and waiting for it to be developed.

Me too. I also relish the definition of traditional prints from film, yet to be matched by digital technology at any price.

organic: I know a guy who developed a photo simply by dipping it in our river

No, you don't. Film development is a timed three stage process conducted in darkness.

/pedant

ive had many xrays since i was young, and often required retakes n the like.. the coolest solution i saw, was a low-powered x-ray that showed up on a computer screen and the doctor could snap away happily then save/print the ones he wanted onto proper film.

Anyone who ever shook/flapped/whatever a Polaroid photo thinking it would "dry" faster is an utter moron.

FarkinNortherner and Organic:

The person in question probably used water from the river in the traditional film development process. A number of years ago a photo student at Ryerson University in Toronto used water from Lake Ontario to develop film.

...except you don't shake Kodak pictures, you shake Polaroid pictures.

And you don't shake Polaroid pictures. You're supposed to let them develop on their own. Shaking can ruin the picture.

Damn Outkast and their urban mything song.

Kodak has been sweating for years. Fist there were other companies underbidding them. Now digital. This technique is one last ditch effort to keep from going under.

I work in the X-ray tech field and yes they still use film to capture the x-ray on but then it is digitally scanned and sent to a server called a PACS server. From there the radiologists can access it using a web-browser.

I drank from that river and developed an illness.

Great. Now Doctors will be ordering 2x as many Xrays as before, "because it's twice as safe now".

Great. Now Doctors will be ordering 2x as many Xrays as before, "because it's twice as safe now".

No they order twice as many because of end runs around Stark. And they make big bucks off self referal.

About 2 years ago, my new dentist did all digital X-Rays. He says that for $500, he'll give me the files so I can photoshop them and fake my own death. Woot!

2005-03-10 08:56:36 AM MrExtion

About 2 years ago, my new dentist did all digital X-Rays. He says that for $500, he'll give me the files so I can photoshop them and fake my own death. Woot!

Why is he trying to charge you for your own X-rays? You paid for them. If he wants to keep the originals, tell him to make a free copy and hand it over. They belong to you, unless you signed some sort of weird release form.

I work in the radiology dept of a hospital in a pretty small town (70K) and we're all digital; have been for almost 2 yrs. Kodak is screwed...

also, xray film smells funny and is a biach to haul up from the file room downstairs

Organic
That made me giggle out loud: Thank you.

/Kodak's saving throw againt becoming obsolete: FAILED

Meh. You still get more rads from a transcontinental airplane flight than from an old-school plain film chest X-ray. Which is ~1/60 the background amount you'd get in a year anyway, just loafing around on the surface of good ol' Terra Firma (5 mrem from plain film CXR, 300 mrem average annual background exposure.)

Kodak has been maintaining the market lead in some DIGITAL medical imaging markets for a while now.

The low dose film is just an attempt to make the most amount of money from that (dying) market while there is still money to be made there. Some clinics can't afford to get rid of thier old equipment in favor of new DIGITAL devices.

On the whole, Kodak's DIGITAL sales will out pace traditional sales this year or next (if it hasn't happened already)

/Kodak saving throw against becomming obsolete: WORKING
/And, yep, you guessed it. I work at Kodak. Flame on.

boogereater- yep, our river is connected to Lake Ontario. That's probably what happened.

Kodak must still cringe whenever they get confused with Polaroid. I wonder how many twenty dollar bills they handed out to buy back their instant film cameras when they were sued by Polaroid back around 1990.

Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, three Rochester companies in the shiatter of obselesence blaming all their woes on something other than their own inability to adjust to new markets and weak leaders.

Cases in point:
Name a brand of sunglasses.
Name a leader in the large format optical storage market.
Who owns PARC.

"cough"

Fuji ->$26 Billion and rising
Kodak -> $12 Billion and declining

byebye, Kodak

w00t!! SUCK IT, FUJI!!!

/born & raised in Rochester

I should probably ask for that thyroid lead thing when I get x-rays at the dentist

Oh, Kodak. I thought it read Kojak.

/"Who loves ya, baby?"

2005-03-10 11:39:00 AM PsychoPhil

I predict digital will flop with consumers once enough people lose a hard drive or two of pictures....

Remember, Kodachrome lasts 100+ years if preserved correctly. You think you're gonna be able to view your digi pics 100 years from now on Windows 2100?

Are you saying that physical media is more robust than electronic media??

Most people have one negative and a couple of prints of any given image. It's a huge pain in the ass to duplicate them later, and it costs money.

They can be lost or destroyed in the same way any small, fragile thing in your house can be, and worse, they tend to be stored in the same containers in the same locations.

Digital images can be backed up for free, distributed for free, and wind up on machines across the world, on cd's and dvd's at people's houses, in e-mail folders, on the web, and in Google's caches.

And with digital formats, you don't need special equipment to read the files years later, just the right codec. I hardly think jpegs are going to be unreadable anytime in the future. And if a new format becomes popular, you don't think folks will be batch converting them with the push of a button?

Yeah, digital media is a 'fad'. Just like computers. I bet we go back to typewriters any minute as soon as somebody loses a Word document!

Sheesh.

Polishwonder74:
that would appear to be three cheeseburger plates, mac and homefries, and a normal amount of hot sauce on the counter of the downtown Nick's

damn you.

/gets in car...

Hopefully I can start another flame war ...

I would just like to point out that digital formats are potentially a dangerous way to store data. All of those CDR disks that you think are going to last forever may very well be as unreadable one day as your Sony Beta movie collection. Not to mention what you will do with all that data on reel to reel tape after your mainframe is no longer around.

The problem with digital is that you may always have to keep moving it around if you want it to last forever.

In some cases, nothing beats a hard copy.

that's a polaroid, idiot.

yeah, but the images will have a 1.4 times larger snr.....

h to the 'ojo

I recently saw a digital dental detector. The detector required 1/6th the exposure of an E speed film.

albeit not the ideal example ... the rosetta stone ... 2200+ years old ... still readable ... no batteries ... no batch converting ... no codec ... just bury it in the dirt and fogetabahdit

Flapping a Polaroid doesn't do anything to help it "dry," but moderate heat does speed up the developer chemistry. While most people were flapping their Polaroids around, a few of those in the know were sticking their pictures under their arms.

I bet it would be hard to flap the Rosetta stone.

i always keep a rosetta stone under my armpit

2005-03-10 08:17:39 AM havesometea [TotalFark]

I work in the X-ray tech field and yes they still use film to capture the x-ray on but then it is digitally scanned and sent to a server called a PACS server. From there the radiologists can access it using a web-browser.

Your hospital should probably look into replacing your traditional film cassettes and processor with a CR system. You can continue using the existing radiographic equipment and get digital images directly instead of scanning traditional films (which is inefficient and loses image quality). Konica's CR system is pretty darn good. If you've already got the PACS server, it would make sense to go to CR and save a lot of man-hours scanning in plain films.

whifflepuff

You're right, that's not the ideal example. It was a quarter century before the entire stone was translated. And plenty of things of that sort aren't readable anymore. And, while digital media may need to be updated sometimes (Some CD-Rs, for example, would only last maybe five to ten years unless you bought ones with the better dyes), physical data has its share of storage problems, too. Taking up space is probably one of the biggest ones. While the average person can probably make room to store a few things, businesses with thousands, or even millions of records, need a serious amount of space to store those records. Digital media tends to be less likely to be regularly purged, for similar reasons.