Slashdot Mirror
New ChromaLife 100 Canon Printer Inkset
Mark Goldstein writes "Some exciting news today for everyone who loves the speed of Canon printers, but hates the fact that they don't have archival-quality inksets. PhotographyBLOG reader Phil Aynsley has sent me a translated version of a page from Canon Japan's website, which talks about a new ChromaLife 100 inkset using BCI-7 dye-inks, with promises of 30 years light-proofness under glass and 10 years antigas fading when used with Canon's "genuine photograph paper". Let's hope it leaves Japan and reaches the rest of the world soon. " The archival issue of printing is a big one for people thinking long term - this would definitely be cool.
In other news, revenue goes up due to the high price of their special paper.
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The problem with digital cameras and our bloody, damned computer media is that I take so many more pictures, but hard drive corruption, decaying optical discs, and flash drive failure have a habit of winnowing my useable image files away from time to time. I've lost enough pictures permanently that sometimes plain old traditional archiving seems like a smart idea.
If I was more than an amateur, I'd be racing for something with archival ink. At least, of course, until somebody comes up with an electronic medium that has the durability of a marble block.
so much for the paperless office (although that was a pipe dream anyway.)
At least, the Canon office will be printed "genuine photograph paper" with 30 years light-proofness under glass and 10 years antigas fading.
I'd be interested what their results are without Canon's "genuine photograph paper".
-Teiresias
Shame on the poster, there's nothing in the article that wasn't copied into the post except the link to canon's site. This slashdotting is totally unnecessary.
"Some exciting news this morning for everyone who loves the speed of Canon printers, but hates the fact that they don't have archival-quality inksets. PhotographyBLOG reader Phil Aynsley has sent me a translated version of a page from Canon Japan's website, which talks about a new ChromaLife 100 inkset using BCI-7 dye-inks, with promises of 30 years light-proofness under glass and 10 years antigas fading when used with Canon's "genuine photograph paper". Let's hope it leaves Japan and reaches the rest of the world soon...
Website: ChromaLife 100 Canon Inkset
are they still going to use yellow cyan and magenta to "create a truer black" read as: bleed your color cartridges dry so you have to buy new ones, because if one of them is out, you can't print. at all.
It is rather simple with automated remote backups.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is a news site, not a product review site. Paying subscribers shouldn't be subjected to advertisements disguised as news.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I've used them all and like Canon the best. The dual black inks (one an ink, the other a pigment for photos) is a really nice feature, especially if you print a lot of text. Unfortunately, Canon no longer seems to be supporting this feature in their current line of printers, all of which seem to be strictly photo printers. Bummer. You can still find the i860 on their site, but you have to search for it.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Disclaimer- I am very much affiliated with them.
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As I see things, as long as the digital copy of your document continues to exist, the lifetime of the dead tree version is unimportant, as long as it looks great for perhaps five years or more. I doubt that historians of the future will rely on much other than digital archives.
.
Photographic negatives degrade faster than the prints made from them (well, perhaps not now -- I don't know), so the photographs themselves become the vital historical record.
As digital storage capacities increase the chances of key records being lost decreases, with the only real risks being computer viruses and carelessnes
So it's great that my inkjet prints will last for ten years, but when they fade I'll just print another one from the pristine digital source.
If the print start to fade, you just print it again!
I've had Epson, Canon, and HP and I love Canon's seperate ink cartridges, however every Canon I've owned has been a jamming piece of shit.
I don't care if you purchase Canon paper, the most expensive paper you can find, fan the paper before install and keep extra paper in a hermetically sealed mason jar they still jam.
As long as you've got someone seated next to it clearing jams all day long I'm sure it's a fine purchase. NOT!
Bob Marley couldn't jam better than Canon
Epson has had this type of archival ink available for at least 6 months, as I bought one and the output is spectacular. I'm not sure why this is story is newsworthy.
If you want to turn your digital image files into real photographic prints that will last a long, long time, try San Miguel Photo Lab. No, regular silver prints on photographic paper won't last as long as platinum prints, but, hey, a couple of hundred years should be enough.
I don't have any relationshiop with the lab, but I've seen their work and it's amazing.
If you want archival prints, get them printed in a traditional photo-lab. Many 1-hour labs can turn your digital photos into photographic prints, made with the same paper and chemicals regular prints are made from.
These should last 30 years easy if taken care of and kept out of the sun.
If you want 200 year prints, you can probably get digitals put on IlfaChrome (formerly CibaChrome), which can last centuries if treated properly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I can print a 4x6 digital picture for 19 cents at Costco, and it goes up to a 11x19 inch for 2.99. No Costco around ? Try Wal-Mart for 24 cents, CVS for 29 cents, etc.
Other than the "I need it right now so I'll pay twice the price for a bad quality picture which fades fast too" factor, why would anybody pay a ton of money for a printer and then pay again in EXPENSIVE consumables, when they have a better choice.
Happy printing.
With the purchase of a digital camera I found that I can take the memory chip to Costco and for $0.19 per print create 4x6 prints on photo paper (developed and printed like normal 35mm prints). I did it as a test and found that the photos (snapshots) were by and large comprable to the 35mm point and shoot I had been using. (haven't made anything larger than 4x6 yet)
While actual photo prints don't last forever, they do last substantially longer than anything I've ever seen come out of a printer. The cost and time (costco is 1 hour @ $0.19 per print) is substantially less than photopaper, ink, printer, and printing time. (They made 50 Thanksgiving prints in one hour).
Doesn't solve the long term problem of storing and archiving the 'digital negative', but seems like a really great option for snapshots and the like.
Filmo The Klown
You can take your flash media into just about any place these days and have the pictures on it produced with the same machines they use to print negatives. And the cost is about $0.20 per print. At those prices, why mess with lousy inkjets?
http://tinyurl.com/58g98
-R
I've bought Epson, Lexmark, HP, and Canon stuff before. I've gotta say I liked Canon the best, as far as the quality, lifespan, and corporate policies. Anyone else have the same preference (and/or hatred of of one).
I have bought all the same except Lexmark as they were the first to underprice their printers and overprice their ink... Now it seems that all the printer manufactorers have found that it is more profitable to own the hell out of their customers with cheap hardware and expensive ink.
I have gone so far as to put my nearly brand-new HP printer in the closet and not use it. If my 7 year old HP Deskjet 400C hadn't physically broken down I'd still be using that (along with the 2nd ink cartridge in as many years -- through college and all the papers it brought BTW).
In 1.5 years with my new HP I have cleared 3 ink cartridges (and it won't just print black if you only put in the black cartridge -- it requires the color one as well) without having to write a 10 page paper a week.
Personally I'll be keeping my images posted on my website and off the shelves in my house until the companies realize that what they are doing sucks.
Epson released the first Archival printer, the 2000p, in the summer of 2000. And it was rated for 200 years light-fastness. It was followed in 2002 by the very popular Epson 2200, which used a newer 7-color archival pigmented ink set, prints up to 13 x 19, uses roll paper, does borderless printing on many sizes, and prints at 2880 x 2880 dpi with a minimum 3 picoliter droplet. It produces more crisp pictures than any photographic process except the laser exposures of the Durst Lambda.
They folowed that up in 2002 and 2003 with four large format archival printers of comparable print quality, the 4000, 7600, 9600, 10600, printing up to 44" wide by 100' long. All of these are rated at 100 years light-fastness.
Now, in 2004, they've released their third generation of archival printers, starting with the R-800, which is the first pigmented printer to produce true glossy prints without "bronzing," has a wider color gamut that any other consumer level printer of any photographic process, prints borderless sheets as well as CD's and DVD's, and prints at up to 5760 x 1440 with 1.5 picoliter droplets. These prints are also rated at 100 years.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that Canon's bringing on the competition, but is a new 30-year ink set four years after Epson's really big news in the industry? Epson dominates here, and with their huge range of printers that take ink sets good for 100 years or more, this isn't a very aggressive step for Canon.
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While 30 years sounds pretty good, it's still well shy of Epsons claim of 100 years for some pigment inks - read Epsons' paper on lightfastness here.
All particular claims of durability rely on a known combination of ink and paper though, so if you are looking at a printer and relying on claims of durability be sure to factor in paper costs as well!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
epsons ultrachrome (non archival is considered lightfast for 75 years (85- a hundred except yellow tends to fade a bit earlier) now, if you use their archival inkset add on about 25 years and lose a little bit of color accuracy (yellow again) what i see that is important is which print heads does it use, as far as i know most of them use old technology epson, yes even roland and hp. micropiezal technology. epson is far ahead of the game and is hell bent on putting these companies in their wake, theyve been a media company since before they invented the first printer for the olympics years ago. it seems to me this is very little to be excited about and about two years too late to be newsworthy. except for the uninformed
Back in 1984-85, MacWorld magazine printed computer-readable programs in a "bitmap" format suitable for scanning, similar to the "bitmaps" you see on some postage meters and on packages these days.
If photocopied onto archival papers, that computer code could last centuries. You could even chisel it into rock if you wanted to, although laser-engraving into a non-corroding metal would be easier.
The downside was the low bit density - well under 100KB per printed page. I guess you could microfilm it.
Of course, odds of anyone but a specialty house being able to make sense of that data 500 years from now is almost zero.
By the way, the in-this-lifetime solution to your problem is not laser-engraving the bits into a marble rock, but rather having multiple backups onto different media stored at different locations, and the means to restore them easily. Now, if you have pictures that will be important 500 years from now, go get yourself an engraving machine a quarry. Be sure to document the format the data is stored it, otherwise nobody in 2504 will be able to decipher your 1's and 0's.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The PIXMA 3000, 4000, and 5000 All replaced that line of printers and offer 4 (C,Y,M,Bk) for the 3000 or 5 (C,Y,M,PBk,Bk) inks for the 4000 and 5000.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
And I am sure your ratio of good pictures to bad has gone down.
Anti-gas?
Damn, I could use a print-job like that after downloading a $10 meal at Taco Bell.
I have to say that, at that point at least, Canon was most popular, because their quality was good considering their low prices. Though it also might have had something to do with the in-store sales rep they had. But HP was miles ahead of the competition in quality, if you could afford their ink. Epson couldn't seem to find a good balance between quality, speed, and ease of use. Lexmark was fast, but the quality was less than stellar, plus their ink was ridiculously expensive.
If I were to go out and buy a printer today, I'd be focused on quality, so I'd still check out HP first.
What are you going to give to your grand grand children?
What family heirlooms could you pass on from the computer generation?
With current photographs being destroyed in approximately 30 years, the only photos left will be of your own parents.
It appears to me that we will become the forgotten generation.
Placing so much emphasis on "I want it now" and not thinking about the future is going to be our own biggest downfall.
I would like to see laser etched copper pages holding the REALLY important data. Something like the Voyager probe. Heck, you could make it a centre piece.
Sure, you need something to parse it with, but its a damn site more durable than a bit of a paper.
The question then becomes, what would you store given the chance?
liqbase
I wanted reasonable photo output at a good price and bought an i560.
:)
You can get non-canon cartridges for it for under $2 that produce pretty reasonable results - pushes my cost per page down so low that i can print away to my hearts content
If you want traditional archiving, make prints and put them in albums. Digital is great for being able to share pictures in a timely manner. It doesn't help a lot for photos to outlast the people you want to share them with.
It does not surprise me to see the typical geek reaction: "Gee, digital media is the way to go", "scan and burn your documents to CD/flash media".
I will get modded as troll, but the truth is that the "Paperless Office" is still an unachievable dream: so many transactions and processes require an actual piece of paper as proof.
One reason Epson is so far ahead in archival printing is that they're the only company using piezoelectric diaphragms in their print heads. Everyone else uses thermal print heads, which heat the ink in order to spray it out, which tends to gum up the print heads more easily anyway. In fact, every other brands' heads gum up so easily that they put disposable print heads on the print cartridge, where Epson printers come with permanent print heads. (Obviously, this allows them to make a killing on ink compared to the competition). This may be why Canon's only advertising a 30-year ink as opposed to Epson's 100-year Ultrachromes- they may have to grind up the pigments smaller to stop them from clogging in their thermal print heads.
So I wonder if these will be plug'n-play replacements for Canon's current printers, or if they're going to come out with a whole new line you have to buy to use these?
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If you want a print that will really last a while, covert it to greyscale, interpolate the image to an 8x10 300dpi, then invert it. Print it on a sheet of transparency. Finally platinum print it. Platinum prints last as long as the paper they're printed on and they look freakin awesome. Archive that! Daguerreotypes are also permanent, though they're made on glass plates which can break, plus the process is more cumbersome for somewhat less spectacular results.
In my opinion the purpose of photographs is to keep a permanent record. I'm 38, so with this stuff, my childhood would be fading to black in front of my eyes.
I'll stick with real chemical process photo prints until then.
- I like pudding.
Now, how about a printer that will last 10-30 years?
All these little inkjets break as soon as I look at them. Our big old mono laser printers have been running since 1996.
There's Lyson, InkJet Mall's generic, Luminos, Jet Tec, and Media Street.
I'm probably missing some, too.
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This is a joke, right? 30 years life is NOT archival. I've seen photographs produced in REAL archival processes that are 150 years old and they look perfect, with no signs of fading. I even use some of those processes myself, and I expect the pigments I use will last longer than the paper, probably something around 400 years.
I have done a lot of research on this subject, and let me make one thing perfectly clear: There is no such thing as an archival inkjet ink. And there never will be, not unless the fundamental technology of inkjets changes radically.
Let me explain this to our presumably technically oriented slashdot audience. It requires some familiarity with the famous Milikan Oil Drop Experiment, which should be well known to anyone who studied physics. Perhaps some of you even performed the experiment in your high school physics class as I did. Fortunately we won't have to do any of the measurements, the analysis is strictly qualitative, not quantitative.
Milikan's experiment involves a vapor of oil drops suspended in an electric field between a cathode and an anode. The experiment had to use oil drops, because the surface of oil drops is ionized. If you do this with a neutral-pH substance, like distilled water, the droplets will not suspend in air inside the field. You would have to add significant amounts of salt or some other ionizing substance to the water to get it to interact with the electrostatic field.
And that's exactly how all inkjet systems work, from the fancy Iris to the lowliest piezoelectric inkjets. Small droplets of ink are propelled by electrostatic fields. The ink droplets must contain an ionizing agent or nothing will happen.
Unfortunately, ionization is the enemy of pigment. Ionization is the catalyst for oxidization, and causes fading. This is why some of the early Epson "archival" inks underperformed their rated lives. Testing was done by Wilhelm Research, in the clean air of Iowa, but when the inks were released, they were used in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, with high levels of ozone pollution. The ionized inks interacted with the ozone in the air, and the prints faded rapidly, sometimes in mere days or weeks, rather than the expected 80 years. The inkset was withdrawn, and obvious flaws in Wilhelm's accelerated testing methods were revealed.
If you look at any truly archival photographic process, the fundamental issue is neutralization of ionization. Adding salts is exactly the one thing you should NEVER do if you want to produce archival prints. But that is exactly what the inkjet printheads require for propelling the inks. Until a technology evolves that does not require electrostatic fields to propel ink droplets, inkjets cannot ever produce archival prints. It would contravene the laws of physics.
I won't even get into the chemical formulation of dyes, and let me make it clear, there are no inkjet "inks," they are all dyes. Inks have a binder, and dyes do not. Dyes cannot be deposited on a surface in sufficient quantities to provide a stable layer of pigment, they merely stain the surface of the substrate. An archival binder is just as essential to archivality as the composition of the pigments. And some pigments are particularly "fugitive," they fade rapidly while others do not, causing color shifts, especially in pale colors where a minor amount of oxidization and pigment loss causes major color shifts. There is no such thing as an archival CMYK dye set. Nobody has ever produced a full-color stable ink set, the magenta colors are particularly prone to fading. If you've ever seen a color poster hanging in a sunny shop window for years, you've seen the shift, the magenta fades away, leaving a sickly bluish-green image.
Well enough of that. Just realize that whenever "archival" is thrown around in the inkjet field, it's being used as a selling point. Every single person who makes an assertion that their ink is archival has a financial incentive to lie to you. Photographers and art curators have specific criterion for archival properties, and if you go to them and tell them you have a new dye that is archival, and it lasts 30 years without fading, they'll laugh in your face.
HP Vivera inks are advertised to last up to 115 years when used with HP premium photo paper.
Without the HPIJS or GIMP-print drivers, my HP's would basically be paper weights, HP's drivers are so bad.
Still, after a long history with them, I've switched to Epson. Never buying HP again. I love that the open source community makes my HP stuff work, but when I pay for "Mac supported" hardware, I don't want to have to rely on the goodwill of others to make it work.
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A lot of people don't understand that current (last 20-30? years) black and white negative that have been properly processed and stored should last *hundreds* of years. this is why for a long time disney would archive their color movies by making three black and white copies based on channel separation (red image on one spool, green on another , and blue on a third).
as a side issue, a lot of talk goes into forgotton formats. i'm not sure that it will be a real big problem in the future as we have tons of documentation on available formats. i recall people stating that getting bits back from the media was not a problem, but understanding them was. i don't believe that the specification for a cdrom is going to be 'lost' for hundreds or thousands of years.
eric
The last canon I had , a bubblejet, was a flaming piece of shit. Got it for christmas along with a scanner cartrige several years ago, and in its lifetime it probably printed about 20 pieces of paper, if that. Ink simply would not come out of the printer after a certain amount of time, regardless of newness of the ink carts. The scanner cart however, worked fine.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I bought a canon instead of replacing my workhorse 1270 epson.Even after checking Wilhelm print longevity. Why?
The color. The epson pigment inks just don't have the pop of the canon dye based ink (especially in the greens). The epsons look good till I compaired them side by side.
My experience is anything I've framed from the epson 1270 which is dye based like the canon, has lasted. Some of by unframed stuff from the same printer hasn't and has shifted significantly in a little as 3 years.
And by converting my old 1270 into a BW printer with pigment inks, I get great Black and White.
Wake me when they last at least as long as their copyright.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
No. Just like you don't have fucking rednecks in England.
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I bought myself a Canon LBP600 (Laser printer) in 1998... I should have checked before: since it was a Windows-only printer, I had to sell it right away. It died long ago (the buyer happens to be one of my relatives).
Immediately after having sold that one, I bought a HP Laserjet 6L and it's still working today.
So, no Canon printer for me, thanks...
One of the reasons I shoot digital is so that my photos can be appreciated by far-flung relatives before either of us is long gone and pushing up the daisies. A few photos may be of value to future generations, but most of the benefit is for those alive now.
Except HPs printers are still notorious for jamming with their non-gravity feed mechanism. The last HP printer I had the great feature of printing a couple of characters on the paper when it thought it sensed a communication problem on boot up. Even with gold plated HP printer leads (parallel) Used to waste paper like tomorrow that way and there was no fix.
I've never had any problems like that with Epson or Cannon
Canon still has no decent linux drivers for their printers....
Let me tell you why.
Inkjet printing is directly related to digital originals... noone does an inkjet print from film.. AFAIK and why would they?
Digital originals can be stored, backed up and copied to unlimited numbers of archival repositories; backup floppies, backup zip, backup CD backup DVD. backup Hard Drive, backup Flash... and through the miracle of lossless duplication (whether the original is a lossless of the raw data or not).. you can keep a backup copy of the digital original for as long as you want to pay attention.
Now this being said. 30 years is plenty for a high-quality print for eyeball viewing, as long as there is an archived copy of the digital original available.
As new technology becomes available you can decide to re-print a new high-quality copy with even greater fidelity and lifespan.
30 years is a long time in terms of technology. Heck even after ten years you're going to want to print out a new copy on new papers with better inks and wider gamut ranges.
If you're selling these prints you should be including a right to reprint for personal use.. with a signed receipt for the original, etc. etc. and a copy of the digital original. Put a watermark in it to keep would be pirates from making unauthorized copies... each sold copy should have a unique watermark... in both the digital file and in the paper itself, similar to signing a print w/ a series number.
This way if you do find copies floating about you can follow the trail back to the buyer.
30 years is plenty, when the original is digital. 30 years is like 300 years when you're talking technology... plenty.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
As a college student giving tech support to seemingly my entire dorm, I deal primarily with the lower end $60-$100 printers. As far as physical wear and tear goes, I find a lot of broken HP's that don't like to load paper (or load 3 sheets at a time). This is consistent with my own experience. Having owned 2 HP's, 2 Canon's and a Lexmark, I found that I had worse luck with the HP's. It's hard to say who has the best driver set because every computer I fix tends to have viruses and spyware to no end making an accurate comparison of software impossible. To answer the parent's question, I'm a canon man.
Huh. Somebody needs to visit the Long Now foundation and recalibrate their idea of what "long term" means.
Thirty years is "archival?" The crappiest stuff in the world will last thirty years. Canon is bragging about thirty years?
And that's probably an exaggeration. There are probably a lot of asterisks about humidity, and what kind of glass it is stored under. (A lot of those CD-R's that manufacturers said were going to last a century are starting to fail in less than ten years).
Light purple spirit duplicator documents will last thirty years. Even if they're a lighter purple than the day they were printed.
Books printed on World War II paper have lasted more than thirty years.
Any old black-and-white photo will last a century, easy. After a hundred years or so it may not have a full rich Ansel Adams tone scale, but you can see that your baby has Great-Grandma's dimple just fine. And that's the one that was sitting in that leather frame on Grandpa's office desk for all those decades...
So, these inkjet photos. Sure, you can always print them out again... except that our supposedly permanent digital media are, of course, only permanent if we are vigilant conservators ready to recopy everything over to a new format every decade or so as technology advances.
Two hundred years from now historians are going to know more about the 1800s than they do about the 2000's.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The advent of USB should have resolved that issue for the most part.
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Why would you want to Archive your pictures on Paper instead of on CD/DVD? Digital storage is the future, not paper.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
If you want an archival color print from either digital files or traditional negatives, go to a lab that uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper in the traditional RA-4 process. Your print will last a 100 years and doesn't have to be underneath glass. In fact I recommend this even if you store your digital pictures on a RAID-5 array backed by tape. There is something to be said about the permanence of a print versus the permanence of digital bits.
Personally, I bought my wedding negatives from the photographer and did all the prints using traditional B&W silver halide paper in my basement darkroom. Fiber-based paper toned in Selenium will last 200 years or more. Heck I even printed the color negatives on B&W paper and they look great.
I have family pictures that are 80 years old and look fantastic. The sad part is that Joe Sixpack's treasured family pictures, created on inkjets or even shoddy photo labs, will not be viewable 80 years from now.
I am feeling the power of the hammer!
--;
The HPIJS driver, as well as the HPOJ driver for OfficeJet printers, is written *by HP* and released as Free Software *by HP*. What more do you want from them? They have absolutely flawless support. In fact, my HP PSC750 (printer-scanner combo) works *better* in GNU/Linux than it does for others who use it under Windows.
This is not an example of the open source community having to "make something work"; this is a rare example of a company that actually supports using their hardware with Free Software and releases their drivers as Free Software. Because of that, HP has my business for life.
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It doesn't matter to me too much though -- the printer is still doing great a year after purchase, so I have no plans to upgrade currently.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Very good point. The poster didn't realize this obviously but if the open sourced drivers are so much better than the one's HP actually shipped with the printer... well why didn't they use their own open sourced driver?
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
one megapixel?
Your comparison is silly. He's talking about art photography. You're talking about camera phones.
Epson and Canon (at least) use heat. They vaporize a bit of the dye in the nozzle, that forces a blob out to a bend in the nozzle, where it is shot with piezo onto the paper. The nozzle directs the blob, not electrostatic energy. In fact, electrostatics would cause the blob to deviate from it's otherwise straight path.
So, the area may be electrostatically controlled, but I don't think it is charged.
I'm not saying 30 years is archival, I happen to agree with you there. But I think you're putting a lot of nonsense into play here.
You may be have professional training archive printing to your credit, but your willingness to use logical fallacies in your rhetoric lends one to see it more as a rant. The most glaring fallacy is that of Poisoning the Well. Basicly your statement "if someone declares their inkjets are archival, they have a financial incentive to lie to you" while possibly true, has nothing to do with whether or not pigment based inkjets do or ever will exist. You're simply trying to discredit any opposition before it has a chance. Poisoning the well in this situation doesn't work convincingly because most people infact do believe that pigment based inkjets do exist, rightly or not. The tactic should really be reserved for when you know your position has few supporting points but you and you're audience are agreement that the position should be maintained anyways.
Quality is a subjective thing. I have worked in digital imaging for over a decade, and I would say that what people look for ina colour printer will vary enourmously depending on the type of output they are intending to produce.
HP is fine for PowerPoint presentations and Excel charts, but in my personal opinion their colour space sucks for photo printing or any type of realistic continuous tone images - they look murky. Comparitively speaking, the Epson and Canon colour profiles work much better, especially with regards to skin tones and things like food items (the HP profile tends to make food look slightly mouldy).
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
A co-worker told me that here in Japan, MOs are considered somewhat more stable than CDs.
n de x.html
I suppose I should search the Japanese web.
Okay, Imation claims life of 30+ years on at least one of their MO lines:
http://www.imation.co.jp/products/pc_media/mo/i
But to qualify my statements, they were based on the demo printouts that the printers in the store were set to print. Canon had little report/presentation type demos. Lots of text, small pictures. HP always had full-page images of flowers, or butterflies, or fruit. And every time there was a new demo, I was always amazed at the vibrancy of the color in HP's. They also had a DPI that absolutely blew Canon out of the water. HP had the first printer I saw in the store that could print out an image that looked like it was a page out of a magazine. And at that point, Canon's demo images were still small and grainy.
But again, I'm not an imaging expert. So maybe what I saw wasn't as amazing as I thought.
Why is everyone so worried about how long the prints will last? I'm no digital photographer, but if i were, I'd archive the source files to CD, tape, etc. You can always reprint the pictures from that and therefore not have to worry about how long the prints will last.
Some one already posted about the lifespan of hp's vivera inks, but the only two replies implied that hps testing was questionable. The truth is that hp doesn't do their own tests, they hire a 3rd party that is an expert in image testing. The company they use is Wilhelm Researchu s.html). All of HP's long-life figures are from this source, and the previous post was correct, up to 117 years behind glass with HP's new ink system and hp premium plus paper, and 70+ years with the previous ink system, which is still more than this "groundbreaking" 30.
(http://www.wilhelm-research.com/about_