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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.
h
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.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!
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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