Archival Gold DVDs: Storing Wedding Photography on 24 Karat Gold Discs

Standard consumer grade DVDs may only safely hold data and photos for 8 to 10 years when well taken care of. Even though 8 to 10 years isn't bad for a "temporary" way to conveniently store and share your wedding pictures with family, friends, photo labs and album companies.

The innovative materials and manufacturing methods used to produce Archival Gold DVD-R's make them among the most reliable storage media available. Other DVD-R's may deteriorate quickly due to common environmental factors: ultraviolet light, heat, and humidity. Using N.I.S.T.'s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) accelerated aging process to test the longevity of DVD-R media, the Archival Gold DVD-R has been shown to safely store your images for more than 100 years.

A key component of the Archival Gold DVD-R's durability is the use of gold as the reflective layer of the disc. Gold is one of the most inert, reflective elements on earth, which makes it perfect to resist the effects of temperature and humidity. These characteristics prevent oxidation, a common cause of failure to most DVD-R's. Thirty percent of Delkin's cost to produce every Archival Gold disc is due to the use of 24 karat gold.

Archival Gold media is trusted by professionals at national museums, universities, police departments, legal firms, hospitals, technology firms, and mini labs to store the invaluable data, photos and video that cannot be trusted to traditional storage methods.

For the latest in DVD archival technology, just click the photo on the left to visit the Millenniata website. I recommend this as necessary reading to all professional photographers who want to keep up with the digital photography industry. The M-writer disc is unquestionably able to archive photos for many hundreds of years. The M-writer disc costs around $3 per disc. The writer itself is over $180 at this current time. Though during the past couple of decades we have seen a variety of digital formats come and go, the 4⅝" diameter disc format is going to be here for the very long foreseeable future. www.youtube.com/user/millenniata

The 4⅝" diameter disc format is going to be here for the very long foreseeable future because of the cost per data storage ratio (blu-ray disc as low as $4.00 each for 50 Gigabytes on a double-sided disc) and for the practical ergonomic (easy to handle - 4⅝" diameter not physically too big or small) and a broad variety of uses. Remember, unlike ALL other media during the past couple of decades, the optical disc format is not an electro-mechanical device subject to failure or malfunction like betamax, VHS, DAT, reel-to-reel, cassette tapes, floppies, etc. There are no electrical, electronic or mechanical moving parts. Whether it is optical disc with data "burned" via laser or data "etched" onto the disc as with the M-writer disc, the 4⅝" diameter disc format will be here for the very long foreseeable future.

Cherry and I recommend that your Archival Gold DVDs be stored in a safety deposit box for ultimate safe keeping of your Wedding Day photography. We will normally use Lightscribe DVDs to go into your DVD Wedding Album which are easy and less expensive to copy and provide to family, friends, photo labs and album companies.