The Good Old Days

Shortly after my son was born in 1996, my wife and I spent an obscene amount of money on a high end analogue hi-8 camcorder. It has a superb picture quality... but over the years we have watched with dismay... as the price of digital video cameras, most recently those with internal harddrives... dropped to rockbottom low prices.

Strangely enough... it seems we may have inadvertently made the smart choice after all.

To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years.

Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries.

Funny how that works out sometimes.

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RELATED: A kinder, gentler time...

When we didn't poison our children.

“Every time there was a story about a toy recall, I got flooded with orders,” Mr. Voake said. “This year stacks up as preposterous. I’ve never had a year like this, and I hope I don’t have another one.”

Mr. Voake said he had made more toys this season than at any other time in his 34 years in the industry. Some holiday orders will not be ready until March.