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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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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
If the print start to fade, you just print it again!
A properly stored CD will last at least 30 years, making it superior to this technology as far as longevity is concerned.
Digital media is really the only way to keep things around for a theoretically infinite amount of time, as you can copy it from one medium to another an infinite number of times without any loss of quality.
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.
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
Um .. I hate to burst your bubble, but can I remind you about the dutch group (name escapes me and I can't be bothered to google, and I was sure it was reported here) who stored a variety of CDs away for 2 years and found significant degredation in over half of them? You may argue that CDs are archival under good conditions, but how many of them are actually stored under good conditions.
As for perfect savings of digital data, the data is only as good as long as someone has the desire to copy from an older to newer medium. Once that desire is not there, your data is practically useless after 2 or 3 generations of memory devices have come along. And this hampers future generations from handling data that we archive now. Just look at the number of 8 inch floppy drives around, and think about how hard it is to re-copy the data on them. Now extrapolate that 100 years down the track. Plus once the mechanisms are no longer readily available, the desire to replicate them drops off. How many people think that data on 8 inch floppys is as inmportant as what is on their 200+GB drives now???
One of the reasons I still shoot B&W film (even though I have a D-70) is that I know a negative is more likely to be readable/appreciated by the least technological means well after I am long gone and pushing up the daisies
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Bzzzt. Only HP printers include the print head in the print cartridge. Both Epson and Canon seperate the two. On Canon's higher end printers (like the i9900) the print head is user-replaceable... dunno about the lower end models.
Also, Canon is advertizing 100 year life for photos stored in an album w/ this ink. 30yrs for under glass (think picture frame) and 10yrs in open air.
Honestly, I really really hope that you can use the BCI-7 inks with existing Canon BCI-6 printers (I bought a i9900 just last week) but I highly doubt it.
And in 200 years -- just try to find a device that will read the thing.
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.
Additionally, most of the higher end HPs have separate print heads. Both the 7110 multi-purpose on my bookshelf and my DesignJet120 (24" 6 color) have separate tanks and heads.
Most of us who own Epsons wished that the heads were replaceable, so we wouldn't have to throw away the whole machine every year or so when the heads get permanently clogged.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think you missed my main point.
Who copies my data when I am dead?
Is my data somehow less worthwhile if I am not around to copy it? Compare this with mediums that do not need to be replicated in order to be accessed (ie books, paintings, negatives).
Look at works that have been overlooked for centuries and then found to be relevant/important. How would they have faired if the climate of the time had been "Well if you think it's important, then *you* copy it".
Building systems that are not inherently stable (in this case requiring active copying in order to be accessible) has a marked cost that I don't belive many people actually consider.
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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!