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Inkjet Photo Print Longevity Lacking
Yet another Anonymous Coward writes to tell us about a piece up at the NYTimes on the (lack of) longevity of photos printed on inkjet printers. As the article's title says, somewhat alarmingly, "It isn't that images fade, it's that they can vanish." The problem is actually more nuanced than this; it's that no-one has a reliable and standardized way of testing inkjet prints for longevity. From the article: "The life of color inkjet prints has also been hindered by the origins of the technology, which was mainly intended for printing things like pie charts, said Nils Miller, a scientist at Hewlett-Packard. 'The initial emphasis was, how do we get bright colors on plain paper," Dr. Miller said. "Permanence was not really on the radar screen yet.'"
Sounds like a good reason to keep my film cameras (a Pentax 645 and a Pentax MX)
Who ctually expects something they print on a inkjet to last forever? Most people keep a digital copy as it and can just print off another copy if needed.
Remember when they used to supply a "sealer" to spread over the old black and whites? Then they put it in a pouch on the paper to be squeezed out as you pulled it out of the camera. Might work?
What?
The two real problems are:
- Digital preservation. Will my files survive 50 years of moving between storage media? Will I be able to view JPEG files in 50 years time?
- People who print their photos on inkjet printers and then delete (or loose) the digital version of the image. This is happening more often as digital cameras are increasingly bought by less IT-savvy people.
These are important problems. However, on balance I think that the benefits of digital preservation are more than the risks.They break every damn month.
further to what I said before I wonder why anyone serious about photography would use ink except for drafts. I've developed onto some very nonstandard surface which I can imaging completely destoying my printer (even if they did fit in thickness wise). There are also beautiful emulsions which will print with metals rather than normal cololours. Iamgie a black and white sunset where the highlights are rendered in gold. Ink doesn't need to last 150 years +, because it is for home and amatuer use.
The prints should be archival at the prices they charge. Ink is the biggest scam in computers today. The excuse that we never considered longevity is total BS the issue was how cheap can we make the ink and much can we charge for it to maximize the profits. The real point is they don't care. You can buy archival ink but it's even more expensive.
There are professional ink jet printers that promise your pictures will last 100 years or more provided you use the right ink and the right paper. It is used for photo archiving - wich isn't such a bad idea because some paper snippets have have been around longer than the western civilization so a paper printout at the right quality certainly will last longer as any of my computers and harddisks - not to mention the brief lifespan of cds and dvds.
The Epson Photo R1800 comes to mind (but there are no doubt others) - I can use one from a company I work for. It is mainly used to do colour testing for professional print jobs. It can do A3 and also panorama printing on long stretches of paper.
Does anyone have any experience with one of those professional printers? Do they live up to their promise or is it just bogus because you need to keep them in dark storage below 0 degrees celcius or so?
Quit smacking them every time you see "PC LOAD LETTER"!
First thought: So does this affect the prints I get from Walgreens?
I know persistent digital storage is the recommended solution, but it's not simple - CDs degrade given enough time, and my 3.5" floppy backups, if they're not all bad, aren't exactly accessible on Macs nowadays. And what comes after CDs? If I continue on the portable hard drive route, will that be a $300 investment in new HD technology every decade? Every 5 years? Just upload it all to Gmail?
Second thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream
The name of the guy they took most of the quotes in the article from. Or, the sound most people make upon discovering their backups are bad.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
It seems everything lacks longevity these days. It just doesn't pay off from evolutionary/market perspective.
I have never understood people's desire to print their photos at home using current technology.
First-of-all, the price-per-print is absolutely ludricrous. It used to be in the 1-2 CDN per print, and has come down, but not significantly. While gas and time may prove a factor for some, I just walk to the neighbourhood developer and get them developed that way (or keep them digital!).
Secondly, the investment reeks of a fleecing. Upwards of a hundred dollars in ink? A packet of 20 sheets of paper for the better part of 10 dollars? A printer that will definitely break before it becomes obsolete? No thanks.
For a period, I worked in a big-box computer store and any chance someone told me that they wanted to print from home, I tried to politely tell them that the technology was unproven, and that the pictures wouldn't last as long as the conventionally developed ones. That, combined with showing them what a discount setup would produce, and what an investment it would ultimately prove to be, would often turn them away from that direction.
It is not that I object to home printing, nor do I have a vested interest in getting people to go to a developer. I am not a professional developer, or one of those photography buffs who insists on doing it in the "well, back in my day..." way. Rather, I see this whole "home printing" phenomeneon as a potential market that has been tapped using an inefficient tool not made for the task.
Now some may point out those supposed "specialty" printers that Kodak, Canon or Hewlett-Packard manufacture, but these are also no different, other than usually fleecing you on the ink.
And for those that would suggest using "off-brand" supplies, for most printing that is a fine suggestion, but in my experience (which, I will admit has not been considerable), the quality is sorely lacking in many of these products. THe paper is ill-suited to the task, and the ink is often "not quite as clear". ANd the price differential can be drastic, but if the product is noticably inferior, then what purpose does it serve?
Just my 2c CND (which incidentally is rapidily approaching parity with the US dollar.)
Folks, I've heard from a photo pro being interviewed on the Geekspeak radio broadcast, that many pros run into each other at the Costco printing dept. I imagine other similar depts. do a similarly good job. Its outsourcing; but considering the volume and competitive market, who on earth wants to buy into the ink-jet printer/ink mafia if they can avoid it? And apparently with volume, these large depts. manage quality okay.
Also, using clients such as Google's Picasa, its just as easy to 'print' to the photo shop as it is on a mafia controlled printer.
- - - - - --
Have a nice day, if you can manage one.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
My kodak easyshare photo printer uses thermal dye transfer. I'd think those would last longer.. hell they're even waterproof.
The old silver-based processes last a pretty long time. Same for the copper-based before that. There is a shop nearby that resurrected some very old metal plates used by a photographer in the early 1800s I think to document Indian life - and they are beautiful. But what lasts is that the images are either etched metal or metal deposited on glass or imbedded in the gelatin coating on paper.
But even conventional color film and photographs are just dyes and are subject to eventual fading. With black and white, you actually reduce silver halide to silver metal. It won't fade. But dyes are organic and will lose color as the dye molecules decompose.
One way to make inkjet images last longer is to protect them from UV light. A guy I know printed two identical images and hung them in his office. One had no protective cover and the other had a glass cover. The glass protected the dyes from UV degredation and that print still looks great. The one with no cover glass has very much faded.
People strive for some kind of lasting mark on society or evidence they existed and their lives mattered. The fact is that most evidence of any of us will eventually fade just the way it has for generations before us. Old fil got brittle, cracked, or was water damaged and stuck together. Old prints suffer similar fates. It's just by luck a that a lot of the old images have lasted.
Digital images have an advantage in that they are lossless and the data can be copied from media to media to keep them current and readable. But it is a maintenance that if you don't do, you will eventually lose the image. You can use a film printer to output images to actual film just like you had taken the image with a regular camera but are limited by the film printer's resolution and now you are back to having a format that can't be copied losslessly.
For lots of people, the only record they ever existed is either a headstone, or more commonly, just their skeletons. Might as well get used to the idea.
Is anybody really surprised?! Honestly? It was never intended for making long lasting stuff but just a cheap way to avoid making real photo prints from digital photos.
I read about this in a magazine in about 1999, and I tested it by taking a sample print, stapling a sheet of black paper to one half of it then leaving it in a window for a few months.
Three months later, the red component of the uncovered part had faded to almost nothing. I know red isn't used in inkjets, but nevertheless that was what it looked like.
It's not so bad these days - I have many inkjet prints at home which are behind glass in the form of a photo frame, and I've had them for a few years now. I've even got test prints which I ran off comparing OEM to cheap third-party inks and papers, and it's still practically impossible to tell any of the prints apart. But I do wonder if the prints will look as good in 5 or 10 years.
Other than instant gratification, does home printing offer any advantages over commercial printing services? Is the quality of prints/paper reasonably comparable?
Strange thing we have so much trouble preventing paper & color degrading over time when centuries ago the problem has already been solved. Just look at all those books written on hemp that are still in great shape & with bright colours that give us insight over the knowledge of past human civilization. It's a shame we're in an era now where mindless consumerism and capitalism are so powerful that products we buy don't have to perform anymore as they did in the past and still cost more... examples of this are everywhere, tasteless fruit & vegetables, electronic devices that barely make it past the warranty date, products that cost more because they're better eventhough the new process to produce them costs less, new products that are pushed on the market in order to maintain royalties while not adding anything usefull or even being of lower quality or environmentally more dangerous, etc...
Okay, we're definitely getting off topic here, but you've piqued my curiosity with your statements. Do you have any pointers to information that substantiates your claims? I'd be interested in that, and it's probably only fair you post that if you're going to put such claims out there on a public forum. (Please note, I am not disputing what you're saying.)
Best fade properties for an analogue color photo system are found in Fuji's Crystal paper that is rated by Wilhelm Research at approx. 35 years, framed behind glass indoors. Negative dye coupler color film has a bad reputation and the same for slide film based on that system. Kodachrome isn't a practical solution anymore but must be considered the best film for archival properties (and more). Ilfochrome/Cibachrome isn't better than Fuji's Crystal paper.
So digital inkjet prints with pigment inks are not bad at all if compared to the old alternatives. Fade numbers see: www.wilhelm-research.com In some cases 2x to 5x better.
It will be hard to keep digital files for that long. And 80% of image files are never printed. Based on that it wouldn't surprise me if inkjet prints actually will represent a better image of today over a 100 years than any other source then.
It is only with silver based B&W photography that inkjet prints can not yet get similar numbers but that's on a >200 years lifespan.
A strange story as HP recently introduced their Vivera pigment inks that rank more or less first place on fade properties in Wilhelm's tests, leaving Canon and Epson behind.
Ernst Dinkla
www.pigment-print.com
firstly,
Why bother doing prints at home?
Well, the same argument could be made about old school photography
Why bother having a dark room at home?
I can tell you why.
1) It because I get fleeced at a lab when I want to print anything larger than 10x8
2) Can you find a lab that uses the type of paper I want it printed on?
3) Can I be sure that their printer has been setup correctly.?
My A3+ printer is calibrated along with my screen. I also use Fine Art papers for most of my printing. Commercial setups don't use this at all. (please correct me here but I have never found one)
The final part of my setup is that I use continious inking systems. This reduces the cost per print considerably. I use Lyson Small Gamut inks and get great results.
Now back to the fading issue.
In the old days of digital printing, yes the inks used caused the prints to fade quite rapidly.
These days, things are different. The sorts of inks used in many printers are very different and when used with the right papers very resistant to fading.
As I mentioned above, the Lyson inks I use are archival quality.
I have prints hanging on my walls that have been up there since 2004 and there are no noticeable signs of fading.
Ok, I'm not the average digital camera user. I'm a semi pro sports snapper so my requirements are 'not normal' but if you want to, you can produce prints that fade at the same rate (or even slower) than 'old school wet darkroom' prints.
You can use archival ink easily enough - all printer manufacturers produce a printer which uses pigmented inks. But they cost. This is a simple list of how printer manufacturers make their money:
Company...Printer........Ink
Canon.....High cost.......Medium cost
Epson.....Low cost........High cost
HP..........Medium cost...Medium cost
Lexmark.....crap...........crap
So what I did was buy Epson printers - low cost for what you are getting, so the top spec ones are a good bargain. But the Epson ink is very overpriced. So I worked out how to get it cheaper. Here is another table, in GBP:
Epson cartridges........15.0
Cheaper cartridges...... 6.0
Fill your own............. 1.60
Continuous Ink supply.. 0.32
So the answer is simple - buy Epson, get a CIS from e-bay, and fill with decent archival bulk OCP ink from Germany.
Marty: His head's gone, it's like it's been erased.
Doc: Erased from existence.
I couldn't resist
Quote: "The problem is actually more nuanced than this; it's that no-one has a reliable and standardized way of testing inkjet prints for longevity."
Do some research. See that http://www.wilhelm-research.com/ does have such tests, and has for quite a while:
"Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc. conducts research on the stability and preservation of traditional and digital color photographs and motion pictures...
"Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower Wilhelm are the authors of the landmark 744-page book, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, published in 1993."
I don't work for them. I just take a lot of digital photos.
The article is typical of some hack cranking out an article without understanding the technology or doing a shred of research.
Firstly there are two main types of inkjet ink, there's dye and then pigment. The difference between them is like watercolour vs oil-paint. Dye inks will soak into the fibres of the paper and change the colour of the paper fibres, pigment inks are the colour, they sit atop the paper as little blobs of colour, like oil paint.
The inkjet prints we've all seen fading are dye prints, which are prone to fading both by strong light, and by atmospheric contamination. They are also compounded by people buying third party inks and refills based upon the myth that they're "just as good". They might look bright an punchy when you print it, but two weeks later when it's fading maybe you'll realise why the big companies like HP, Canon and particularly Epson spend millions on ink research, and why their inks cost more.
The Archival inkjet printers we see on sale today pretty much exclusively use pigment inks, which have their own set of problems to overcome ( gloss differential, bronzing & metamerism ). Pigment inks are very stable, and can include other elements like gloss and uv filtering coatings. A lifetime of 75 years can be expected, longer if stored away for archival purposes. B&W prints can last even longer ( it's often the yellow that's the first to fade ).
Dye inks are becoming increasingly better in the longevity department too, the latest efforts from Epson have a much longer lifespan than previous dye inks.
The article suggests there is no standardised testing, this is not entirely true, the slightest bit of research would have yielded the standardised tests developed by Henry Wilhelm at the Wilhelm Institute. Virtually all the major manufacturers ( Epson, HP, Canon, Hahnemuhle etc ), with the exception of Kodak who are a bit naughty here, use these same tests for their quoted longevity claims. It's as close to a "standard" as there will ever be, and is widely accepted in the industry.
The best archival quality in wet-chemistry prints was considered to be Cibachrome, now refered to as Ilfochrome Classic. A good pigment inkjet will last as long or longer than a Cibachrome.
inkjets have long been known for fading. You can pay a lot of money for higher grade ink carts for most printers, that are good for supposedly 10 years.
A lot of the photography shops in my area push the issue really hard, how "digital prints can fade over time" of course recommending you bring your memory stick into them so they can print good photography prints instead. (gotta change with the times or die I suppose, chemical photography is going pro-only)
My argument against this is simple... I can pay you $10 to develop a roll of 36 that will last 10 years and then require me to pay you another $10 to reprint them ten years from now, OR I can inkjet them here for about $1 and reprint them again in 2 years if necessary. Assuming I simlply must keep the prints good forever, I can pay $5/10 yrs or $10/10 yrs, and in many cases I don't need hardcopies ever, I can view them on my computer forever for free. Also in many cases you don't need the whole roll reprinted, just one or two, which makes the inkjet a lot more convenient and much cheaper.
I think I'll stick with my inkjet and its cheap ink. Take it ino the camera store if you need a print of the kids blown up to 8x10 for grandma or something.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Actually, the photos seem to last longer than the printers. I've seen quite a few pack up just because they weren't used for a while. Granted, this could probably be solved with nozzle cleaning (not the push-button-gui kind), etc., but given the difficulty in doing this, vs. buying a new printer...
Next time, I'm going laser.
Seeing as most 1-hour photo labs these days seem to use something that looks like inkjet, it would be interesting to know what the expected life of these prints is, compared to the life of traditional prints.
Personally I like the old analogue film printing method, but the shop I used for this has switched to digital equipment now.
Everyone here with digital data from 30 years ago raise your hand.
Everyone here with photographs from 30+ years ago raise your hand.
We need photographs to last "forever" because they are more easily kept, more permanent, more durable than the digital originals.
ShoutingMan.com
What the fsck does that mean?
You can't take the sky from me.
Or, and this is a crazy thought: don't rely on printed copies of digital photos.
Just pass around the bits themselves, and back those bits up.
I don't understand people's fascination with printing photos.
And supposing you did really want a printed copy, who cares if it disappears?
It costs almost nothing to make another.
I've inherited stacks and stacks of family photos and slides - and I can't get them through the film scanner nearly fast enough. I worry far more about those physical boxes and their handling, than I value their ability to hold up over time compared to inkjet printing.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I believe it is the combo of in k used on what type of paper that makes the difference.
I have gone to futureshop where they offer guarantees on their hardware...for a price then a year or 2 later, when something breaks, no problem, just bring back your receipt...
however 80% of all receipts printed from there on that weird waxy paper become invisible.
I have a hard time remembering what had guarantees where, but when the only help i had of remembering
gets erased (on purpose???) then this seems to me a scheme all its own.
I have seen this paper used elsewhere with the same result, even at banks (TDCanadatrust)
It seems the ink does not stay as the waxy residue seems to conflict with carbonation or oxidyzation , but print it on regular school paper (the kind you buy anywhere also usually made from recycled stuff) and no problems years later!
Ink jet print CAN last a long time, depending on what you use. Obviously if you're using a home desktop solution to print out your prints, they won't last very long, especially if you want to display them in any light. Supposedly Kodak came out with a solution not too long ago for the personal inkjet printer set, but I really don't think that those prints will last up to 100 years. Epson Ultrachrome K3 pigmented inks will last up to 100 years, depending on what stock you use. Papers with optical brightening agents (OBAs) will not last as long as virgin papers. For example, an Epson Premium Luster contains OBAs in order to make the paper "brighter" (i.e. it reflects more light off of its surface, it's not necessarily "whiter"). OBAs have a tendency to turn yellow over time, and that stock is only rated at about 70 years using the K3 inks. However, Epson's Ultra Smooth Fine Art paper, which has no OBAs, is rated to last 100 or more years using the K3 inks. The truth about it is, as long as you're using the manufacturer's ink (not a refill, because in my opinion, refills are worthless) and a manufacturer's paper, you'll get the desired results. That may not jive with a lot of people, they may not want to believe it, but it's definitely true. At least in this case, Epson has developed an extremely stable product, in the printer, the ink, and the paper. Here at RIT, there's something within my school called the Image Permanence Institute where they deal with this stuff day in and day out. I've actually never visited where they're at, but from what I hear, they can simulate putting around 100 years of light on any print to see the effects and rate a paper's or ink's permanence.
Is why there aren't any photo printers out there that just use the Polaroid style of image development. Polaroids last nearly as long as traditionally developed photos, and loading a pack of polaroids into a small printer seems like it would be a whole lot easier than dealing with separate printer paper and ink. Of course, then you lose the "multifunction" portion of the printer, but you end up with much higher quality prints anyway, so who cares?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Effectively there's a small problem here :
- The digital files have to be usable in the future. As said on specialised page, the current situation is rather strange with consumers having much more luck than professionals.
Currently, most consumer camera use standart and open format (JPEG) for which there are supported by a wide number of code, some of which is open source (libJPEG). Even if the format is phased out in the future, you can still be sure that in 30 years you may find some specialised "archivist imaging software" that has JPEG import filters, recompiled to whatever platform we will use then (128bits x86 descendant, running CoyoteOS, Hurd unstable alpha or Microsoft Linux).
The situation is not so good for professional-grade equipment which very often use proprietary format to store hi quality pictures (each different series from each different manufacturer use their own home-made format for "RAW" pictures). Very often those format are poorly documented, kept secret or protected from reverse-engineering by DCMA. They are near to no tool to handle them (appart from the software that came with the device). In 30 years, the knoledge about one peculiar format may very well be lost, and no more software could be found that can open it (and pretty much sure that, had that software be excavated from somewhere, the deprecated OS and hardware running it will be missing too).
- The digital files have to be kept in shape. You can't just leave them on a medium and wait. Optical media may rot. Magnetic removable media such as floppy or tape is almost gone and you're not sure to find consumer readers in the future. HD may get bad track over time and data format may shift (how long will Windows keep FAT16 compatibility ?). Removable solid state is either subject to electromechanical incompatibility (still have SmartMedia reader ? Sure there will be arount in 30 years ?) or may malfunction (USB stick not responding after a lifetime of abuses).
What one needs is to transfer the files to newer medium regularily and the check them for errors. Keeping files on the family's RAID server (which will get newer drivers over time as technology and capacity change) is a solution. Or uploading them on a website (whose technical staff will take care of the hardware refresh), if you can trust it enough.
Then you don't need some crappy made-for-home cheap technology. If you want to keep your prints forever, you should use some method known to withstand time. You should "burn" them on actual film (laser optical printer like used for film recording) using chemically stable negative, and then keep the results in a temperature controlled safe.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I've seen some pigments fade *completely* when subjected to a 5-year accelerated UV test. Sometimes we have to choose pigments that aren't as brilliant or ideal as the one we want, because the pigment won't last. Seems like HP took the opposite stance -- make brilliant photos now, that don't last!
This is why no ancient photographs exist. We need to find a way to port our digital images to stone.
- Yes, I am posting at a -1, and no I will not use a proxy to bypass my circumstances.
Who would want / need an inkjet print to last forever? Prints of any kind degrade over time. The great thing about digital copies is they remain in perfect condition as long as you keep them.
Digital photos are much safer because of the ease of copying. The hard disc and CDs my first digital photos were stored on are now long gone - but the data is still there, on three PCs plus backup DVDs.
I backup my photos and a couple of other bits and pieces onto both my work PC and my parent's PC every few months. It's trivial to keep this many copies of the data - 10 minutes work every few months.
You are right dyes can fade, sometimes very quickly.
But that's why a lot of newer printers have pigment based inks instead - these can last much longer, being rated to 200 years with the right paper. Even undersunlight these are supposed to last a long time, and the way pigment inks work it's more reasonable to expect they will do so.
You can get good image permanence if you are willing to spend a little more on a good printer and ink.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yet another reason to not own an inkjet. Get yourself a nice color laser printer (laserjet 2605dn here). It will have postscript, so will talk to linux perfectly (http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/PPD/). It's toner does not go bad if you don't print for a few months. You'll be able to print thousands of pages, even with the starter cartridges that come with the printer. It will print much faster. It will print on normal paper without bleeding. It will pay for itself very quickly (have you seen the prices on inkjet cartridges lately?).
On the occasions you want photo prints, send them to Wal-Mart or Target. They'll be printed chemically with the real photo-printing hardware and don't cost that much.
About as un-researched as a typical /. reply...
First off, watercolor and oil paint typically use the exact same pigments. One water based, one oil based. Watercolor can be used like oil paint, ever heard of gouache? Oil paint can be used like water color by thinning it down with paint thinner or other solvent. The absorption in to the paper is more about application options than how the pigment works.
Inkjet dye vs pigment is similar. Dye works fine on glossy papers with much less absorption as well as backlit and clear films with almost no absorption. Pigment based inks will absorb deeply in to absorbent papers just the same as dye. If it didn't, the print heads would clog.
There are certainly questionable third party inks being sold out there but there are also good third party inks. 3M also does much research on inks and in some cases is selling ink to both the printer manufacturer and the third party ink provider. Exact same ink just different price. As with most technology, research is required when buying third party inks.
You are right that dye generally fades faster than pigment based ink. Typically it's been the choice between bright, saturated colors with dyes and fade resistance with pigment based inks. But as the technology improves, the two come closer and closer. Dye fade times are improving and color is getting better on the pigment inks. High end inkjet printers can use both pigment inks and dyes, though not at the same time. Most have changeable ink systems. Just depends what you are using it for. Currently, use pigment based inks if you want it to last beyond a lifetime as long as it's kept out of direct sunlight...
I'm a fairly recent convert to digital photography. I never considered for once using an inkjet -- got burned years ago by a series of Epson Stylus printers, and swore I'd never return to inkjet -- monochrome nor color.
So, when I want hardcopies of my digital images, I send them to Adorama in NYC (Noritsu RGB laser printer / kodak Endura paper / traditional color chemistry)
A few notes:
For YEARS now, when you take film to be printed, that film is scanned, and what is printed is a low-rez scan of that film. The days of the one-hour photo guy making optical prints from your negs are *long* gone. I'm sure there are a few labs out there that still do pure optical, but I bet they're "pro" labs like Dale and the like. Hardly what joe sixpack would use.
Places like Adorama make their ICC profiles available.
If you're a digital photographer, you MUST CALIBRATE YOUR MONITOR with a device like Heuey, Spyder or EyeOne or similar. I can't stress this enough. If you want the UNCORRECTED print look anything like what you see on the monitor, you must calibrate. With a device. Eyeballing isn't enough.
If you use a decent online photo printer, they'll offer to "correct" your images. IF you have a calibrated monitor, say NO. Print 'em as-is. Otherwise you'll get nasty surprises.
Digital printing has given control to the photographer that most people didn't even know existed. In the one-hour-photo era, the machine ops would "guess" at what it is you wanted -- leading to blue susnsets and orange mid-day shots, and worse. With digital YOU are in control, so please make an effort to learn about the art of printing. What applied in the hobbyist darkroom still applies today, only the tools have changed.
To me this is a no-brainer. Endura is rated by Kodak to 100 years -- this is a big jump from the older papers. Comparing the quality of Endura vs. an Inkjet print it is quickly apparent the ink photoprinters are one of the biggest ripoffs, one of the biggest cashcows to hit the market since the Gilette razor. With most online printers, 4x6 is 19 cents, 10x8 a buck and change, 11x14 about 5 to 7 bucks. Cheap cheap.
And lastly, food for thought:
Even "silver" color prints are prone to fading. The only true archival photo medium for physicial prints is a PAPER (not resin, PAPER) black and white silver print. All other technologies fade with time, some faster than others. Kodak claims their Endura Professional paper is good to 100 years in home use. Dunno how true that'll be -- but I hope it lasts longer than the stuff we used in the 70's and 80's -- some of my negatives have noticable color shifts (primarily the old Kodacolor II stuff) and most of my prints from back then have faded -- even in dark storage.
I've seen inkjet prints on "photo" paper in co-worker's offices and cubes, and let me tell ya.. in 2 years they look like a 20 year old Kodacolor print -- faded, faded....gone.
There's no way I'll bite into these printers. I'll keep sending my stuff to Adorama and maybe MPix. I favor Adorama because they offer the most flexible interface for the ardent amateur / pro, and I don't think they're as "morally correct" as WalMart. I don't think Adorama will call the cops if you have the temerity of taking a picture of your two year old in their birthday suit. Walmart has been known to do that. There are documented cases of WalMart calling cops and family services because someone had the demented, damaging idea of taking a picture of their kids playing in the tub. Some of these cases have ruined lives. So... say NO to walmart.
I shun Kodak / Snapfish / Ofoto because in their TOS they have "..will not print blasphemous images." What if I decided to make a photograph of a dog taking a leak on a crucifix? Or something equally or more blasphemous? I dont want some "morally concious" printer denying me the ability to print my work... so to hell with the Moralist printers.. of which Kodak / Ofoto seems to be the worst of, with WalMart
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Your post is an inappropriate use of slashdot.
If you're going to make such claims, be able to back them up.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
First off, the majority of digital photos are never printed. As it turns out, Kodak and other film and paper manufacturers bet their future on printed digital photos around 1995, including at-home inkjet prints. For the past decade they have been hemorrhaging money due to losses on their digital-oriented businesses. The "faster, cheaper, doesn't have to be better" mentality of the digital age has brought photography to a point where crappy snapshots with a .7 megapixel camera integrated in a cell phone that barely works for voice calls can be considered "good enough."
You can have your new and shiny rubbish. I'll stick with my Bessa, Tri-X, and a bunch of smelly chemicals. While your mom may say your photo is beautiful, I have people throwing money at me for my photos and I have to continually turn down requests to shoot various events.
Now that I have my B&W bigotry out of the way, back on subject. A couple of years ago I decided to test the longevity of inkjet prints on various papers. After seeing prints disappear in a few months from certain combinations, I went to Office Depot with $500. I purchased the low end Epson at the time, a set of ink cartridges, and one pack of every single paper in stock. First off, Kodak inkjet papers and Epson inks don't work well together. I made two test prints on every single paper. One would be kept sandwiched between layers of acid-and-lignen-free card stock in archival conditions. The second would be placed on the wall of a utility room without any environmental controls, exposed to the horrid bleaching effects of fluorescent light. Two years in only two samples show degradation, and only one of those exhibited more fading in uv light. Neither of the degraded samples were intended for inkjet photo prints.
My conclusion: Inkjet prints, at least with Epson inks and proper inkjet paper, are damned good. As long as you avoid the cheap stuff, your prints will last for many years. Will they last as long as an archival-grade silver gelatin (black and white) print? I'll let you know in 150 years. Will they last longer than an RA2 print from the late 1970s or early 80s or even one of the early RA4 prints from the same era? They already have. Will they last as long as modern RA4 prints? It's entirely possible.
I will say this. Unless the prices for inkjet paper have dropped significantly over the past year (I haven't checked), digital RA4 prints are significantly cheaper. When I began this test, the cheapest paper was $0.254 per 4x6 print not including the ink! Add another $0.40 for the inks, and it's a losing situation, especially for the good papers that cost over $0.50 each sheet. With Adorama's digital print service charging $0.19 for a 4x6 print, it's rather silly to print at home. Even with shipping via priority mail, ten digital RA4 prints are cheaper than inkjet prints.
My favorite papers were from Ilford, Epson, Canon, Fujifilm, and Office Depot. It was impossible to choose a favorite between those five. Each had subtle unique qualities. Least favorite was Kodak, mainly because it didn't absorb the Epson ink. The best value was the Office Depot paper. Personally, I'm more loyal to Ilford for reasons that should be obvious to anyone that does black and white work.
Even if the inkjet image fades away, we will still have the digital files saved on cd-rom, right? Oh, wait...those only last 5 to 10 years. Well, okay then, we'll save them on our ntfs-formatted 3-terabyte windows hard drives. Okay, maybe not. Well, then, what about the mag tape drive? Oh, yeah, with that unique format that nothing will be able to read in 20 years. Err...well...who needs a lot of old pictures anyway? We'll just have artists paint historical images for posterity just like they did in the middle ages.
OK - it appears they have been backed up.
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=237517&cid=19
umm, ease up on getting too hemp-fundamentalist there man. Useful form of paper for sure (and yup hemp's useful a whole lot of things as well as a nicer smoke than tobacco and it's mainly for socially constructed reasons we're not growing so much of it these days) ... but there are lots of other issues as well if you want decent conservation of written texts.
:-)
(Professional conservationists jump in at this point, I am a professional librarian who's had the pleasure of working in archives occasionally, that's my experience).
How you construct the raw material for your substrate is an issue, lots of industrially produced papers in the 19th century had way too much acid so are now breaking down, earlier hand produced methods were more stable. But there are some fine industrially produced archival papers these days now folks have worked out better production methods. It's just that Joe Public doesn't want to spend that kind of money and goes for the cheapest paper they can get their hands on. People have been able to make books that last for a long time for many years and they still can, its just you have to pay for it. Would you pay 100,000 dollars for a new book? That's probably the equivalent value of some medieval books (or more) when they were produced, the price of a decent house. You pays your money and you gets what you paid for.
Also it might be worth remembering lot of the really fine papers which have survived until today were written on vellum, i.e. calf skin, so that might be your luxury writing base of choice, keep a herd of cows handy and kill as required...
Inks are also a big issue, it wasn't all fine and dandy in some Arthurian medieval world till the evil industrialists came along (though they were bastids for sure). Lot of older inks were based on chemical compositions which have etched their way into the paper and do degrade over time. A lot of those earlier inks were environmentally pretty nasty as well. It's just that these days we expect heads of state and few more people besides to be able to read and not just 1000 people or so per country being able to write, so there's a much higher volume of printing products being turned out
Interesting. No scientific testing - just change printers a lot. The worst performance I have seen was an Epson 850 with Epson ink on Epson paper. Prints that were exposed to office light were notably faded within 6 months. Same prints were reduced to greenish yellow shapes within one year. Had some older Canon BJC 6xx prints in the same location that still looked good, (not perfect) after 2 years in the same conditions.
people are frequently disturbed to find all those photos they put on CDs and DVDs only have a probably lifespan of 5-10 years, due to flaking of the discs.
If you want archival photos, you need to print on archival (acid-free) photo paper using long-living stabilized materials.
If you want archival photo storage, the only thing that really works is tape. That lasts about 100 years (mind you, you won't be able to read it in about 10 years, unless you keep spares of the devices around).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just print the color seps onto slabs of granite, laser etch them in about 1/2" and then run film positives off of them ever 100 years or so.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I don't expect my inkjet-printed photos to survive, but I absolutely expect my data to be there. Even though I burn my photos to a CD-R, I also keep a copy on my hard drive. By this point, I must've moved those JPGs about half a dozen times now, so it's not like I expect to lose them all when my drive crashes.
I also keep lower-res copies on sites like picasa and fotki. It's all about redundancy.
This is a business started by a former co-worker (well, boss) when I was in the print trades in the 90's. I'd expect excellent quality from this guy, but I confess I've never used the service either, so... YMMV.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta. ^_^
You can't take the sky from me.
Indeed the only people who came before us about whom we care at all, have made creative cultural contributions (literature, art) or intellectual contributions (to politics, philosophy, history, etc.) Most people are far more interested in what Shakespeare wrote than what their great-great-great grandfather looked like as a kid. All the candid snapshots we take will mean increasingly little to the people who are further outside the moving window of interest that consists of those living in the present and the decades that surround today.
When it comes down to it, we're all just ephemeral patterns of information instantiated in matter, patterns that happen to be able to reproduce themselves imperfectly with energy input. Even the ideas we might painstakingly chisel into stone may not outlast the genetic information we pass on to our descendents (if we successfully reproduce).
But human civilization has become the substrate upon which memetic evolution is now acting as the primary driving force of progress in the universe (or at least our local region). The universe around here is just waking up, realizing its own existence, and deciding what to do with itself.
What really matters is the ideas we pass on to our progeny, which we have some control over. We currently have no real control over the genes we propagate; they need only be nominally good enough for survival.
In the meantime, it really doesn't matter if you preserve your grandparents' wedding photos for your grandchildren to see. They won't be interested.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey