A DVD-RAM jukebox is what you need if you have serious amounts of digital photographs to access.

If you have lots of Gigabytes of digital images to store, consider upgrading to DVD-RAM, DVD-RAM is replacing CD-R and CD-RW.

Although most DVD-RAM and CD jukeboxes are marketed for large companies, in actuality the places that most need a DVD-RAM or CD jukebox are photo studios, museums, and all the institutions that have photo archives.

Naturally prepress is an obvious situation for jukeboxes as well. Yet photographers and museums need to have their photographs archived. In the digital era such an archive quickly overwhelms traditional storage capability.

The first storage attempts are usually with Zip drives and Jaz disks or some form of MO drive. This is what I first did, and only later did I realize it was a costly mistake. Zip drives may be cheap but the storage disks themselves are painfully expensive. This makes Zip drives the worst way to store digital photographs. First of all, if you are doing professional quality digital photography, or scanning of your legacy slides, negatives or prints, your files should be too large to fit on a Zip disk. Even a Jaz, even the larger Jaz disks, are not a good solution.

CD-R is the most economical interim solution, especially with an 8x burner, but for long range storage you need a professional solution, namely a jukebox. Just like the old Wurlitzers, the modern jukebox can play your CD disks. Just imagine the convenience if you have all your files accessible in a media asset database such as Canto Cumulus and all your disks neatly numbered inside a jukebox.

No more searching by hand, reading all the labels scribbled onto the CDs.

At the left is a shipping carton of DVD-RAM disks (from Maxell), about 230 GB.

If you are doing full time digital photography with a large format scan back (such as a Better Light or PhaseOne), you will fill all these disks within a few months. The sooner you face reality the better you will be prepared.

But when considering which jukebox to order, consider one that has capability to handle DVD-RAM disks. The present generation of DVD-RAM jukebox can of course read only one side of a DVD-RAM disk, namely 2.6 GB, but that is sure better than a mere 650 MB of a CD.

So when you buy your DVD-RAM disks, be sure to buy the single-sided (2.6 GB) disks. We recommend DVD-RAM from Maxell.

Cygnet Storage Solutions makes a DVD-RAM jukebox. You can get more information by calling them at 1-800-729-4638

MicroNet makes a DataDock that includes DVD-RAM. MicroNet also makes RAID systems, an alternative method of storage of massive quantities of digital images.

Escient is coming out with a product that will store 200 CD disks or DVD-disks (DVD-ROM, the DVD not in a cartridge, not at all the same as DVD-RAM).

Plasmon has long been a leader in the CD jukebox industry; Plasmon is now making DVD-RAM libraries.

Sony Electronics also makes a CD jukebox.

Of all these companies, we have inspected the Cygnet Storage Solutions DVD-100 unit at Seybold '99 and more recently at GraphExpo (Chicago).