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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.'"
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.
There is no good reason to keep your old film camera unless you can take a better picture on it personally.
If you have a high quality digital camera that takes great quality pictures, you can send your digital files in to many online digital development stores. They will then develop your digital pictures using traditional methods, instead of just printing them using an inkjet printer like Joe Public.
The key here is to buy quality cameras. Most cell phone based digital cameras will not take the quality of pictures that most people would be proud to actually get professionally developed; they may be cute and fit in your pocket/purse, but that's about the extent of it unless you're just taking pictures of your buddies in college while out drinking.
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Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
So you're keeping your photos and negs in acid free paper in a nitrogen environment?
This story kind of reminds my of reading about how the platinum & silver emulsion-on-glass negatives of photographers like Mathew Brady ended up as panes in greenhouses. <GACK!!>
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.I doesn't matter how good your photograph is if the paper it's printed on degrades, the ink fades or the DVD corrupts. I find that knowing the cost of photos with a film SLR causes one to tend to be a little more careful and lends itself more aptly to good photograph composition - that is good pictures are inherently more in the nature of film than digital.
And as a production manager of a newspaper (http://thecatholicrecord.org) I have never heard of a photoshop printing digital using 'traditional methods.' It would require photographing a print which is just stupid - especially when ink developers claim 100yrs+ on their inks.
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.
I have never heard of a photoshop printing digital using 'traditional methods.'
I guess the word 'traditional' was a bit too generalized. By using the word 'traditional' I meant that they will print your picture out on proper paper that has a gelatin coating on the surface that protects the ink just like normal photographs when they are developed. The current inkjet photo paper does not offer this type of protection.
h
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
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?
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.
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...
I switched to a Kodak 1400 Dye-Sublimation printer and their tiny 4x6 dye sub printer about two years ago now. Before that sunk a lot of money into ink/paper for a Canon S9000.
I do a non-scientific Fridge Test. That is, I do what most families do with their prints. The put a magnet, stick em to the fridge, and leave them.
Within 45 days anything from my S9000 printer would fade, even more annoying if the magnet didn't move you'd get the magnet outline because underneath it was ok, but anything exposed to the air vanishes.
On my Kodak 1400, and my Kodak Printer Dock 3 the same 'fridge test' has them still looking like new (i'll print a new one every six months and compare in regular light) and I've had several on my fridge for two years. To the best of my knoweldge Kodak (and other) DyeSub printers stand up just like silver halide based on what I've read on the web - take that FWIW. Silver Halide printing would last about 20 years exposed to the air.
That being said, on the Canon S9000 if your print is under glass in a frame - it does not fade. I printed six 4x6s, three dyesub, and three Canon S9000. I put them in a 6 4x6 frame and they've been on my desk at the office now for 18 months. No fading on any of the images.
I'm now all DyeSub. I have the Kodak 4x6 printer, a Mitsubishi 9550DW that I use for printing 4x6, 5x7, and 6x8 for my Photography business and my Kodak 1400 for printing 8x10s. I know the cost per page exactly, and don't have to guess. That's the other thing I hated about inkjets, you never really now when/why you run out of ink.
I've not seen an inkjet that can 'out do' the printer at a lower cost. I'm very happy with the dyesubs.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
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
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.
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
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?"
Most of the labs I've seen use the Fuji Frontier machines. Basically a three-laser colour printer (as in 'lasers print straight onto the photo paper') combined with a supply of light-sensitive photo paper and a develop/fix engine on the back end. All the advantages (print longevity, tried-and-tested technology, cheap in quantity) and disadvantages (chemical waste to deal with) of colour print processing, combined with the ability to print from digital.
Feed a Frontier TIFF images (with no EXIF information, unless you want it to run auto colour correction on your images before it prints them - this applies to JPEG too), in the sRGB colour space, with around 300DPI of resolution and you'll get some pretty good prints. If you want to be fussy, get your local lab to run off a couple of colour check prints, then create a colour profile for that printer from the images. Of course, most people aren't that fussy...
I challenge you to find an inkjet printer that can match the quality of a Frontier, and at the same speed. That's why you don't see mini-labs using inkjet printers for anything except the while-you-wait services - they're too slow for the volumes involved, and when they are quick enough, the quality is abysmal.
"traditional" as in: using chemically processed paper and using chemicals to fixate the image. As opposed to squirting ink on a piece of glossy paper (dye-sub or inkjet printers).
The difference being that machines that do the former will typically cost between $50,000 - $500,000, which is why nobody has them at home (well, that, and they're big...and use some rather nasty chemicals). But they produce superior and longer-lasting output.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
No, not really. You see, unlike film, images digital images have the potential to last forever. It's a myth that film photographs will out last digital images. Who cares how long digital prints from a printer last? Ten years, a hundred years, the life time of a print is irrelevant. What matters is the life span of the original media; that be film or digital image. As long as you have that you can make prints.
Now here is the kick in the balls. Film degrades. Sooner or later the physical film media will decay into dust. Be it a 100 years or a 1000 years, soon or later that negative will cease to exist. The chemical process of developing the image also speeds that up. You see when you expose a negative the developing solution you start a chemical reaction that starts the process. When you put the negative in the stop bath it is suppose to "stop" the developing process. Well it doesn't. What it does is slows it to a crawl. The image on the negative may last forever to a human but the development process is still going on. One day that image will fade from then negative. The same thing applies to physical prints made from film images.
This is not true for digital images. They have the potential to last forever. As long as we have computers and networks we will always have the potential to view that image. That digital image has the potential to be as good 10 years, 100 years, even a billion years from now. Yeah, I know dvd degrade, harddrives go bad, and file formats will change. That maybe but physical digital media can be backed up and file formats can be converted. Film images can't. Once that image fades front the negative its gone.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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.
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 ]
"Silver-halide" prints are superior, only in certain terms. All ink jet prints use more colors than the three found in "Silver-halide" paper, and so have a larger color gamut. They can print much more deeply saturated colors. violets, yellows, and reds, in particular.
True, ink jet print tend to be more easily damaged.
I prefer Silver Halide for increasingly subjective reasons. For example, the fact that the colors are buried in the emulsions makes it harder for the Brain to have that "ah-ha" moment where it figures out its being tricked by a flat representations and raises the "Its just a piece of paper stupid" alert. Halide prints preserve the "suspension of reality" a bit better than ink jet, but Ink jet can print more colors, so It's a trade off best informed by purpose.
AIK
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.
Compare apples to apples. Inkjet (bubblejet, whatever you fancy) does just that: a jet of ink onto the surface of a piece of paper. Comes with all of the problems we've been talking about. Dye-sub has been the choice for, oh, better than a decade now because it does not put the image on the surface of the paper, but rather into the fibers of a specially treated sheet of paper. By use of a high-temperature heating head, it SUBlimates the DYE from a solid sheet of donor into the paper. Sure, it'll fade in time, but it's just a resistant to most of the elements as traditional wet-processing is.
There are other technologies out there as well that are dye-sub like, such a the Pictrography process (Fuji Pictrography printers, which is a laser-based sorta-wet chem dye-sub). Pictrography in particular is interesting, being that it's relatively cheap for a wet chemical system (about 7k USD), is self containted, and uses only water (no really nasty waste stream).
Chris Knight is my hero.
I do it all the time, using labs that have the Cymbolic Sciences LightJet, or Chomira-type printers. These printers can really be thought of as digital enlargers, putting digitally controlled light onto traditional materials like Fuji Crystal Archive. Traditional chemistry to develop the result gives you an essentially "traditional print" from digital bits, and if you start from a digital original there's no need to rephotograph anything. (If you start from a slide, which is what I originally did, then a drum scan of the slide is typically your highest-quality option, and then use the above process to produce a result.)
While it may seem paradoxical to use a digital printing mechanism when you want to start from a slide and end up with a traditional chemistry print, the benefits of doing so in terms of color management and repeatability far outweigh the extra work, at least for fine art prints. This workflow allows you to not suffer with, say, the sorts of necessary contrast increases one typically suffers when printing from slides. If you have a digital original, it's even easier, of course. The only real catch is that these printers are large and expensive, but a large number of top-tier fine art nature photographers use this workflow for their prints today.
I'm a nature photographer.
Wow, so NASA regularly conducts shuttle missions to change the film in the Hubble Space Telescope? I didn't know that!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I take digital photos, but I usually have a few select ones that I like to print. I organize them into layouts like you would see in a photo magazine and send them off to print.
It comes back in a leather bound book with pages exactly the same as you would see in any good quality book.
Black's Photography does photobooks.
http://blacksmemorables.com/albums.html
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