Disadvantages
- The principal disadvantage of microforms is that the image is (usually) too small to read with the naked eye and requires analog or digital magnification to be read.
- Reader machines used to view microfilm are often difficult to use, requiring users to carefully wind and rewind until they have arrived at the point where the data they are looking for is stored.
- Photographic illustrations reproduce poorly in microform format, with loss of clarity and halftones. However the latest electronic digital viewer/scanners have the ability to scan in gray shade which greatly increases the quality of photographs, but they still can not duplicate the nuances of true gray shade photographs -due to the inherent bi-tonal nature of microfilm.
- Reader-printers are not always available, limiting the user's ability to make copies for their own purposes. Conventional photocopy machines cannot be used.
- Color microform is extremely expensive, thus discouraging most libraries supplying color films. Color photographic dyes also tend to degrade over the long term. This results in the loss of information, as color materials are usually photographed using black and white film. The lack of quality and color images in microfilm, when libraries were discarding paper originals, was a major impetus to Bill Blackbeard and other comic historians' work to rescue and maintain original paper archives of color pages from the history of newspaper comics. Many non-comics color images were not targeted by these efforts and were lost.
- When stored in the highest-density drawers, it is easy to misfile a fiche, which is thereafter unavailable. As a result, some libraries store microfiche in a restricted area and retrieve it on demand. Some fiche services use lower-density drawers with labeled pockets for each card.
- Like all analog media formats, microfiche is lacking in features enjoyed by users of digital media. Analog copies degrade with each generation, while some digital copies have much higher copying fidelity. Digital data can also be indexed and searched easily.
- Reading microfilms on a machine for some time may cause headache and/or eyestrain.
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