So, let's go on to the reader letters. Mary Beth Figgins writes:

I totally agree with your comments on preserving negatives and on the shows Clean Sweep and Mission: Organization. As someone who has worked at a state historical library for almost 30 years and as a family historian, I am always appalled at their firm "suggestions" to toss negatives, "excess" prints, and items passed down from family members including paper materials. If someone made those suggestion around here they would immediately be thrown out.

There seems to be little regard for the past in any form on these shows. "If it can't be displayed, you don't need it". How about preserving those items for future generations to enjoy? Instead they need to find a way to organize those negatives so they can be easily matched up with the prints if more are needed. Negatives are too valuable to be put in shoe boxes and allowed to get bent and torn.

Another representative letter comes from Kate E. Corcoran, who says:

David, I wanted to drop a line to THANK YOU! for your article "Saving your negatives in a digital world". At one time I also had to be restrained from attacking the TV when I heard the advice about throwing away negatives. Even if you do scan negatives, the first time you lose a computer hard drive or had a CD-ROM get too scratched up should convince you that originals of whatever kind are much better than copies. Thanks again -- Kate C.

These are great comments. I store my negatives in a sealed plastic bin in my closet. If any of you have some great ideas or tips for negative storage, please send them in!

And, proving that justice isn't blind, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Mirsky writes:

David, do you have any recommendations regarding negative scanners? Thanks in advance for your response.

Joe, I haven't done any comprehensive reviews of negative scanners. About six years ago or so, I bought an HP PhotoSmart S20 which had the benefit of, at that time, being relatively cheap at under $500. It's not the best scanner in the world, but it's served me without fail all this time. I did a quick search on eBay, and as of this moment (with 4 days left), there's one there for $41 -- although it's likely to go up.

It used to be that negative scanners expensive, in the $4,000 and up range. Now, there's a whole range of them in the $200 to $500 range. In most cases, you want to look for the class of product known as a "slide scanner" rather than the flatbed scanners that have a negative attachment. The slide scanners are built for scanning that one or two inch square and optimizing the optics for a scan of that size.

In terms of brands, I'd recommend sticking with the slide scanners from one of the camera companies. Whether you're talking a Canon scanner, a Minolta scanner or another brand, you know the optics are going to be reasonably good and the technical support reasonably mediocre. Like I said, I've had no real complaints about my HP PhotoSmart and it's put up with my abuse for years.

If you pick one and really like it, send us a short review. We'd all like an excuse to go buy more hardware. Really. Some of us can't help ourselves!

Take care and we'll see you next week!

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and can be reached via email at david@zatz.com.