Will digital images taken with today's camera last? Can we still view them as beautifully as we can today in the future? What will happen say 50 years from now?

Unlike chemical film, digital images do not age so that as long as you can preserve the data the quality will be unchanged. Thanks to improvements in display technology and image processing software it is more probable that the image quality your descendants see will be even better than the way you see it now -- just like a 1940s movie watched on a modern TV looks better than on an old one. I am not convinced that file format obsolescence will be a problem in future because we will have software that can decode -- and probably recognize -- every format ever made. But there are two other gotchas: Media obsolescence: as long as your files are on some media then there is a risk that in a few years only a few specialists are able to read them. On the other hand, if you use cloud storage you can't be sure that the cloud will be maintained forever. Lost awareness.  What is even more likely to happen is that you have carefully stored all of your important photos on physical media and in cloud storage but your descendents are unaware that they are there. I think of this every time I see an old family album in an antique market. Somwehere there are relatives who don't even know it exists.

Will digital images taken with today's camera last? - I'd say most probably. Even if new formats get created. I'm sure people will be able to convert old format to the new formats. Digital photos are just basically 1s and 0s representing colors in pixels. In its core, photography is a pretty simple medium with a pretty simple need. Can we still view them as beautifully as we can today in the future?- This is where I'd say that digital files actually excel at. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a 50 year old photos that haven't deteriotated in some ways, whereas digital photos will look pretty much the same on a monitor no matter how much time has passed. What will happen say 50 years from now?- Can't really say. But in my opinion, photography has succesfully stood the test of time so far. It has a pretty long history starting back in the 1820s. Since then, new technologies cropped up, such as video, 3D, computer animations, etc. Just as photography didn't "kill" paintings, I'd say that photography will be around for much longer than 50 years.

Between digital files and albums/prints, If I can only pick one, I would probably say digital format. Although albums and prints are very special to my heart. Here are my reasons: (1) Digital files will last (if you back them up) With the advent of reasonably-priced cloud storage and cloud backup, there is no reason for anyone to not use it anymore. (for $5 / month, you can get 100 GB on google drive, for $4 / month unlimited backup service from crashplan) Not everyone is doing it just yet but it will be more and more common. Yes, DVD will break, hard drive will fail but digital files will prevail if you back them up. If your house burn down or an earthquake destroy your house, the digital files will stay up in the cloud , we can't say the same about the physical album can we? Ok that may be an unlikely situation but the real question is how important are these photographs to you -- wedding photos, family photos, photos from the first trip with your sweetheart? Probably very important, right? The great thing is that there is an easy and cost-effective way to make sure that your digital files stay safe and sound. We probably have heard someone say something along the line “DVDs won’t last, computer might not have a USB drives, technology will change and etc..”. They are missing the point. Photos should not remain on DVDs / flash drives, it should be transferred to hard drives and uploaded to the cloud. (2) JPEG is here to stay, it can never be obsolete. The reason is simple. How many photographs do you think were taken (or stored) in JPEG format that were never printed? tens of billions? hundreds of billions? How will people view these files if they suddenly become obsolete? If there is a new / more popular format (like Google's WebP), there will be a super easy way to convert JPEGs to the new format but I doubt that will ever happen. Whether we like it or not, a large number of married couple got their wedding images as digital files only (not to mention many other non-wedding photographs taken) and years from now there will be a LOT of people who want to view these images and there will be HUGE demand, there will definitely be supply. Screen resolution will be higher, of course but I am 99.9% certain that we will also be able to adjust to lower screen resolution (we already can today) and view images as beautiful as we can see on today's screen. Another point worth mentioning is that screen resolution will saturate at some point. It is said that the perfect pixel per inch for human eyes is 447 PPI (We are being very generous here and Steve Jobs probably disagreed with this..) , we are not there yet but we may get there sometime future. Today's iMac 27" has a resolution of 2560x1440 and even if you display image from EOS 10D, a camera that came out 10 years ago, you still haven’t fully utilized the resolution of the images taken with that camera! (3,072 x 2,048). If we ever get to the day that we have 27” monitor (say 23.5” x 13.24”) with 447 PPI, this will translate to a resolution of 10,504 x 5919 ~ effective 62 MP (Mega Pixel) . Today ‘s professional camera can already produce quite high resolution ( 5,760 x 3,840 ~ 22 MP for 5DMk3, 7,360 x 4,912 ~ 36 MP for D800). With most of the screen today you can also adjust resolution quite a bit, by a factor of 3 actually (Ex: my laptop can change resolution from 800x600 ~ 0.5 MP to 1600x900 ~ 1.5 MP) So if they ever build that 62 MP monitor, you should be able to adjust resolution down 3 times and display images taken from 5DMk3 as beautifully as and as vividly as you can see on today’s screen (if not more). (3) There will be a cool new way to view photos to view your photos digitally. Remember the time when iPad came out and we had fun uploading our photos and view them on iPad?  Windows 8 has a very cool photo gallery that allow us to use touch screen to view photos in a very cool way. So what’s in store for us in the future? There will be new devices, there will be new OS, there will be new software that allow us to view photos that we already have in a completely new way. Of course, if we keep our digital images, we will be able to use the new technology to view the photos. Without digital files, we won't be able to take advantage of the new devices / new software.