Image quality with microfilm is poor, often the images are barely readable. With optical disk storage, images are high quality. Microfilm Printing Expense . Printing from microfilm can be expensive. Documents printed on photo paper are expensive due to the cost of the paper.
Printing microfilmed documents on regular paper requires additional equipment.
Image Management . With microfilm, we must wait until the film is processed to determine if the images are legible. If a bad image is found, we must film the entire roll or find the bad documents and send them in the next batch to be redone. This whole process requires work and management. With optical disk filing, images are inspected as they are scanned, insuring quality.