If it's really critical that you be able to handle all Word documents properly, the only way I know of to do it, short of keeping a dozen PC's around with different versions of Word on each, is to use a Mac. There's a Mac program called Maclink Plus that will translate from any version of Word to any other, as well as between most other word processing formats. On several occasions when I was in college, someone who started a paper in a computer lab and then had to use it in a dorm PC, or vice versa, couldn't get it to work (even if they'd "saved as" an older version when going from newer to older machines), so they'd come to use my Mac to translate from one PC Word format to another on their PC floppy disk.
This happened again when I went out and got a job. The company was all Windows based, but we were still using NT in 2001, and we would frequently be emailed Office attachments in newer versions of Office we couldn't use. I'd have to forward the attachment to myself at home, go home for lunch and translate it on my Mac, then email it back to myself at work.
I think he knows what he's talking about here, forking is really awful. Over and over again, I've seen people with NT or 95 buying games that only run under 2000 or XP, or the newer forks like 98, ME, XP, or 2000 failing to run software from the older forks like NT, 95, or 3.1. One of my nephew's favorite games under 95 wouldn't even run under 98. It's really confusing for customers too, especially now that there are things that still say "Windows" like CE, but that run entirely different and mostly incompatible software. My Mom ran NT, and several times bought software that wouldn't work on that fork, which was so different from the concurrent "95" fork.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Bill would know what a pain in the ass it is for an operating system to have a bunch of divergent and not always compatible offerings available.
Speaking of the film being like ass, didn't everyone just love that hip, trendy musical number with all of those CGI singing muppets that run up to the camera and scream that Lucas edited over Jabba's court? Well, it looks like we can expect a repeat of these wonderful, heart-warming CGI song-and-dance numbers in Episode III.
I think the "Art of Revenge" caption at the top refers to Lucas exacting revenge on Star Wars fans.
Perhaps some of us non-idiots should learn how to correctly use commas, or the word "hopefully," in posts about how stupid everybody is. How many non-idiots does it take to proofread two sentences?
In case anyone's having trouble, this is not an advertisement.
Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U
on
US Stem Cells Contaminated
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes, as everyone points out over and over, Bush opponents regularly blow this totally out of proportion- it's not a "ban," stem cell research is not "illegal." This is simply a restriction on using Federal Government funding to support research that develops new lines of human, embryonic stem cells, and all four of those items in italics greatly reduce the impact of Bush's executive order compared to what is often claimed.
Never the less, the executive order in question is reprehensible. Bush is using tenuous, illogical, religious grounds to justify denying a large category of funding to a promising area of scientific inquiry. Hundreds of potential stem cell lines for research are being destroyed daily from aborted fetuses. If Bush is in favor of destroying existing resources (human tissues) instead of using them to advance science and save lives, why not ban organ donation? Does anything in the bible say "thou shalt not help fund researching [new, human, embryonic] stem cells if thou art the [federal] government?" If this research is immoral, why only ban government funding, as opposed to all funding, or the research itself? If this is about abortion, why not oppose abortion, rather than research? Can anyone make sense of this policy? It scares me, not in how sweeping the effects are, but because The President, the "Leader of the Free World," is using executive orders to dictate where scientific research funding goes based on personal, nonsensical, unpopular religious motives.
I think the rest of government should do what the Pentagon does, and ignore it. There's no basis in law for "executive orders" anyway. I doubt any president would allow a case based on violating an executive order to go to court, in case the Supreme Court ruled that Executive orders don't exist. Chances are, Bush can't do anything but get grumpy if the whole Federal Government simply ignores his ban.
Since this article is mostly about lossless codecs and barely mentions the lossy ones, I don't see it as unusual that it doesn't mention AAC. It doesn't mention MP3 Pro, Real Audio, VQF, or many others, either.
The interesting information from Apple that it leaves out is about Apple Lossless Encoder. This is built into iTunes, so it's easy to rip to this format on both Macs and PC's. Obviously, it can be played back with iTunes too. It compresses to about 60%. It can be played back on the iPod, and it does support Apple's DRM scheme.
Another comparison of lossless formats, can be found here.
Well, flowers would be one of the few things where the gamut on the i9900 might make a difference over the 2200.
But if the prints weren't made with a good system, (color managed, etc) then it's just as likely that the difference was due to how the prints were made, rather than the limitations of the printers.
If the bright, saturated parts of the flowers looked more bright and more saturated on the Canon, than that was probably representative of a real difference between the capabilities of the printers. But if the whole image looked more "vivid" and less "flat" from the Canon; the grass, clouds, flower pot, or whatever else was in the picture, then what you were probably seeing was a poorly done print off the Epson, not an inherent limitation of the device. I'm sure it would only take me a few minutes, without messing with the image data, to find driver settings that would yield a flat, boring print of the picture on the Canon and a bright, vivid one on the Epson. If you did choose the Canon based on one poorly made Epson print, and the longevity of the prints is important to you, I feel bad for you that they'll be fading away in a few years.
But if you print a lot of pictures where flowers or other bright thing occupy a lot of the field of view, and you don't care much how your current prints look in 10, 20, or more years, then it sounds like you made the right choice. If you aren't selling the prints or anything, you can always reprint them when they fade, and by then, you'll probably have a printer with an even wider gamut and longer life. I just hope you made your choice for the right reasons, not based on one poorly made print from an Epson.
I'm sorry, that was supposed to read i9900 and "R800," not "SP2200." Those were the color spaces I was comparing in the previous post; you're right that the SP2200 has a smaller gamut than the i9900.
How many images that you want to print include colors that lie outside the color space of the SP2200 and inside the color space of the i9900? I'm guessing very few. If you aren't trying to print a picture of a rose or a stop sign, a set of crayons or a cookie-monster cake, then the SP2200 should be able to produce the exact same colors as the i9900. I don't believe gamut makes a difference for the majority of prints. Sure, it's important when you need it, and I'm all for a larger gamut. But if you randomly Google Image search up 1,000 photos, only a dozen or so are likely to contain colors that are out of gamut on the SP2200. And of those colors, only a few of them will be in gamut on the i9900. So if the prints on the i9900 are regularly "more vibrant," and you're not trying to print an image dominated by supersaturated primaries, then there is probably something wrong with how the prints were made. With good profiles and the same paper, most prints should look very similar on those printers.
Don't be silly, I'm sure your friends weren't lying to you. But have you compared prints of the same image on the same paper on the two printers, printed with good ICC profiles? I suspect there are as many people out there whos friends say their Canon can't match the Epson prints for being "vibrant." As for store samples, I don't think anyone was bribed, but were you looking at the same picture? Epson generally tries to sell to artists, and a lot of their sample prints I've seen are faces and such, where you don't want to turn up the contrast and saturation to huge levels. They aren't going for "vibrant," they're going for "realistic." I bet that for the i9900, with its 8-color extended gamut ink set, Canon uses test prints that look like the "after" in the Claritin ads. this is born out by looking at their advertising samples online- Epson uses the bald guy in the steel square, Canon uses a race-car driver with super-saturated primary logos all over the place, and a completely unrealistic enhanced green grass in the background (gotta show off that green).
If you're referring to anything other than extremely saturated primary colors, then I'm interested to see what you think this quality is that you call "vibrant." You said the Epson inks have darker blacks, and the paper dictates the whites, so if anything, the Epson should have a greater contrast range. It seems to be generally agreed on review sites that dot densities over about 2-3 million dots/inch^2 don't make any visible difference. The only factor left would be the droplet size. The i9900 does have a droplet half the volume of the 2200, which could produce smoother gradients, which is important to the perception of depth in pictures, and you did say the Epson prints look "flat." But the Epson has light cyan, light magenta, and light black, which the i9900 doesn't, which should make up for the larger droplet size.
I can't say that I've seen the same image printed on the i9900 and the SP2200 to compare. I know the SP2200 can make gorgeous prints. I can get prints out of it that look better than prints from custom photo labs off the same negative. But maybe the i9900 is better. There's always going to be something better. I suspect Epson's replacement for the SP2200 will be better than the i9900. And I hope Canon's replacement for the i9900 is better than the Epson at the time. Just like computers, there's always something better comming along. If you can get gorgeous prints, from your own desk and at an affordable price, that look better and last longer than most methods devised by man in the 150 year history of photography, then I'd think you'd be happy. But yes, I'm sure the prints in the future will look even better than the prints today, and I'm sure that some printers will continue to be better at some things and others will be best at othe
How can you print an animated 3D rendering? I only print photographs. A lot of the pictures I print are landscapes. Most of the rest are of people or pets. You seem to have gotten very confused about me viewing the color spaces printable with the i9900 and the SP2200, as opposed to making prints on the printers. CIE color spaces are all three dimensional, if you want to get a decent comparison between two color spaces, a flat image file doesn't really cut it, it's just one slice through the actual color space taken in the middle, perpendicular to the white/black axis. But there's no point in printing the color spaces, the whole point in having them rendered three dimensionally is to be able to spin them around and compare them on all three axes. Would you like me to email you a.wrl file of the printable gamut for the i9900 and the SP2200 so you can see what I'm talking about? It appears you aren't familiar with viewing or comparing color spaces.
It seems to meet all your criteria.
- Well under $700 ( $300)
- Lasts well over 10 years
- Prints 13 x 19's
- Has a wide gamut with bright colors
- Makes excellent prints (without any "bronzing") on both Matte and Glossy papers
- And, as I listed above, works well with Lyson's CIS system.
Of course some of the sprays are also known to slightly change the color tones too
The sprays slightly increase the contrast by making the blacks appear darker. That's all. If you think they actually change the colors, get your ICC profile made with a coated printed target. But they don't shift the colors, they just extend the contrast ratio a little further into black.
I do admit that the Durst Lambda, and possibly the Noritsu and Konica, which I am not personally familiar with (are they newer?) make marginally (but definitely) sharper prints than even the very best inkjets from two years ago, which were printing with resolutions around 4 million dots/inch^2 at a droplet size of around 4 picoliters. However, I think these high-end photographic process machines have reached the limits of sharpness inherent in the grain of the paper. The paper can be improved, but traditionally it has not been improved as fast as inkjet prints have been improving. Already, inkjets reach dot densities of 11 million dots/inch^2 and droplet sizes of 1.5 picoliters. I don't currently have access to identical magnified shots from a Lambda (or equivalent) and a latest generation inkjet to compare, but I believe it is only a matter of time before the inkjets surpass these last few high-end photographic processes for clarity. I should qualify that: there are still photographic processes like shooting an 8 x 10 positive and making it a slide and backlighting it, which produces a sharpness no inkjet will probably ever reach, but basically no one does this sort of thing, I'm sticking to comparing popular methods of mass producing reflective prints for normal use.
As for the colors, a color profiling system with a spectrophotometer can measure the average difference (delta) between the output (print) and the input (original digital file), and inkjets are the best I'm aware of, when used with a well-run color ICC color management system, at producing accurate color prints. It's true that traditional photographic processes still beat most inkjet prints in some areas of color gamut, like bright reds. But the new printers, such as the Epson R800 and the Canon i9900, with their 8-color inksets, are beginning to surpass traditional prints on color gamut. Again, the inkjet's color gamut has been growing much faster than the color gamut on traditional photographic methods.
As for the "film look," I think that given enough fiddling, a new, professional inkjet can produce pictures that are indistinguishable under fairly close scrutiny from their photographic process counterparts. I don't know exactly what you're referring to, but a lot of people refer to "the film look" as a greater appearance of depth in the picture. This is often due to smoother gradients, particularly in skin tones, that make the picture "jump out of the page" compared to flatter-looking inkjet prints with less smooth gradients. But since about two years ago, I don't think these constraints have really applied to the best new inkjets. My Epson 2200 can make pictures with every bit as much "depth" as I've seen in a photographic print. But my HP that prints at 1200 x 1200 DPI with larger (8 picoliter?) droplets can't compete at all, with either the Epson SP2200 or a photographic process print. Have you seen professional prints from machines like the SP2200, R800, or Canon i9900? I think you'll find they capture the photographic "feel." But you're right that if you go back in time much farther than these printers, inkjet prints were certainly missing something. I'm sure that for years we'll be seeing people referring to using authentic high-quality photographic processes, not crappy inkjet technology, simply because people aren't keeping up with the times. I'm not accusing you of this, you're well informed, but within the next five years or so, I bet that sometime, you'll take a look at the best new inkjet prints, and conclude that traditional photographic prints don't have anything to better to offer.
Well, the i9900 does give the R800 a run for it's money on gamut. The i9900 has a better green gamut all around, and beats the R800 on dark reds and pinks. But the R800 has a significant advantage in blues, indigos, and violets, as well as saturated yellows and yellowish greens. It's hard to tell which color gamut covers a larger total volume in an animated 3D rendering, but it's a close call. They both certainly have their advantages and disadvantages. I have to admit I haven't kept up that closely with Canon, and didn't realize they were using an 8-color inkset now. (Although I know it's been 10 months since Canon's press release.) Yes, it's competitive in gamut, and resolution (i9900 at 11 million dpi^2 and the Epson at 8 million dpi^2, both of which are arbitrarily high) and minimum droplet size (i9900 at 2 picoliter, R800 at 1.5 picoliter.) But it's not at all comparable in longevity, if that's something that you care about.
As for the "bronzing" issue. Yes, the spray does fix the bronzing issue. The reason you get the "bronzing" with Ultrachrome inks is that the inks are thicker and they actually lay down a thick coating of ink that sit on top of the UltraCrome compatible microporous-coated inkjet papers. Since the paper is glossy, and the ink puts down such a thick layer on top that it does not fully soak into the paper, you can see it standing on top and it looks matte comapred to the paper. Putting a glossy layer on top of the ink completely fixes the problem. Yes, I've seen this first hand. Yes, other people have seen this first hand. And yes, it is marketed by experts for this quality. It's the exact same thing that the new R800 does to solve the problem- put down a glossy layer on top of the matte ink. Therefore the whole print surface is glossy- problem solved. Since I've done this dozens of times, and it works, I'm curious what your evidence is that makes you say "Sorry, but a "protective spray" doesn't fix the bronzing issue"
As for underestimating the seriousness of the problem- I made a series of 8.5 x 11 prints, including some with lots of blacks, on papers known to exhibit the problem (including Epson Premium Glossy Photo paper), and showed them to a group of 8 people. First I asked for comments without mentioning the bronzing effect. No one mentioned anything like it. Then I told them about the effect, and asked them if they could see it. Only one out of eight people said they could see this effect on their own, without me suggesting they angle the paper. These people were sitting around a table in a room with multiple bright lights, passing the prints around, so it's not like I was controlling the lighting or viewing angle. And that one person who saw it thought it was cool! They said it brought out details in the darkest regions of the print that they otherwise could not see, and gave it a "3D look." I have looked at a lot (a thousand?) prints from the 2200, and including hundreds of black and white prints, where the bronzing is supposed to be most noticeable. Unless the light catches it at certain angles, the problem is completely invisible. With a controlled viewing angle where you don't get glare off the paper, I defy anyone to tell me if a print was made with ultrachromes or not based on seeing "bronzing." I've got otherwise identical glossy prints right here in front of me as I type, from an Epson 2200 and an HP, and I can't see the difference unless I tilt the pages to get glare off the light. Even with a magnifying glass. And I'm using a bright, diffuse, flourescent light- which is supposed to be the worst viewing conditions for bringing out the problem. Have you actually seen this problem, to be so sure that "the problem is more severe then then you're suggesting"?
I also wanted to add that pigment based inkjet inks from DuPont have now also surpassed the color gamut of dye-based inks on professional as well as desktop printers.
OK. Here's a link to a PDF Material Safety Data Sheet for replacement ink for Epson inkjet printers. Notice the pH: dead on 7.0, with a deviation of plus or minus 1.0.
I guess it relies on its ionization, except it's OK if it's pH neutral, or maybe a little bit basic, or maybe a little bit acidic?
Do you have any references for this idea that all inkjet printers use ionized ink? It's true that the IRIS (now IXIA) printers use continuous-flow inkjet printing, where the ink is ionized and the droplets are "steered" by running them past charging plates and deflection plates. But most inkjets use thermal printing, where the ink is rapidly heated in the print head to make a bubble, which pressurizes the ink and squirts it out the nozzle. It is only aimed based on careful positioning of the print head. Epson, and some high-end professional printers like Roland, use piezoelectric printing. The piezoelectric effect is where a mechanical stress occurs in a material due to an electrical charge. A small piezoelectric diagram forces the ink out through a narrow (10 micron) orifice. Again, dot-placement is controlled by careful print-head placement, not by electric plates guiding ionized ink.
In fact, while Epson and HP's ink formulations are not known, there are many third-party ink sellers who do list their formulations, and they tend to be rather clear about the fact that they de-ionize the carrier (water) before making the inks. And they don't add anything ionized. Yet, these non-ionized inks work with these printers. How is that? Fuji also mentions that only a few expensive large-format printers use ionized ink.
Even if the inks were ionized, it is entirely unclear that oxidation would break down the large color particles in pigment based inks like Ultrachrome inks. Your arguments fail to address this. Pigmented inks are what were used in classical oil paintings, many of which have been displayed without glass since the renaisance, probably without significant fading. During this time, they've been heavily oxidized. You do not present any case that adding an ionizing agent to the ink would accellerate the breakdown of the pigments to make the inks significantly unstable. Do you have any research, or math, or arguments as to what makes you think that the addition of any ionizing agent would break down any conceivable pigment too quickly to make it stable?
"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."
Yes, that's why, at least with dye-based inkjet inks, the paper is critically important to the life of the prints. The paper is the binder. There are two main types of inkjet photopaper coatings. Microporous coated papers provide the least protection against oxidation. Still, good microporous papers, like the microcermaic coatings invented by Asahi Glass, allow large amounts of ink to be deposited with quick drying and without smudging, and the more ink, the more it can oxidize without changing. They use tiny ceramic (alumnia sol) particles in a silca gel, which rapidly sequesters the ink. Viewed under a microscope, this paper looks like jagged mountains. This is how they gather enough ink to "provide a stable layer of pigment." That's why these papers are usually used with more stable inks, they don't protect the ink much, but they take a whole lot of it into the paper.
Swellable Polymer papers use a nonporous coating of organic polymers that are water-receptive and SWELL TO SURROUND THE INK after it hits the paper. The majority of the ink is completely protected from direct air exposure. How do the inks oxidize, then?
Kodak has managed to combine these two approaches in their latest Ultima Picture Paper, which both takes a heavy coating of ink and en
"nobody knows if a wide carriage version of the R800 will ever come to the US"
A wide carriage version of something better is certainly coming, and it will surely include the new higher quality gloss. They aren't going to just stop development with the current generation of printers. Anyway, the "bronzing" is only visible when the image is held at certain angles to the light, and those are the same angles where you get glare off glossy paper anyway. But it is admittedly a weakness. However, if it actually bothers you, you can fix it right now off any Epson print with an archival glossy protective spray, like PremierArt Print Shield or Lyson Print Guard Spray.
And no, the R800 does NOT have a wider color gammet then any other consumer level printer. Dye based inks are still superior in that regard. The only thing the R800 does is add an 8th tank of "gloss enhancer" which helps reduce but doesn't completely eliminate the bronzing effect on glossy paper- it doesn't change the gammut.
Well, thanks for correcting my statistics on the Epson 2200, I did have some numbers wrong. But I'm surprised you'd be so nitpicky on that, and immediately follow it up contradicting me with complete misinformation about the R800. Since the R800 has 1.5 picoliter droplets and 5760 x 1440 resolution, they no longer have to use "light" colors to achieve smooth gradients. So they dropped light black, light magenta, and light cyan from the Ultrachrome inkset, and in place of those three, they added Red, Blue, and gloss optimizer. With the addition of red and blue inks, the R800 can cover almost the entire SRGB color space, plus a whole lot more green and blue. Epson claims it prints a 19% larger gamut than HP's dye-based Photosmart 8450. Can you name any printer that covers a larger color space than the R800, without going up to giant professional printers like the 12-color Colorspan DisplayMaker Mach 12?
- A good inkjet print, like with Epson's Ultrachromes, will last as long or longer.
- Good inkjets now produce sharper prints than any photographic process except the laser exposures of the Durst Lambda. The newest generation or the next may surpass even it. Oh, and good luck finding a local lab with one of those anyway.
- With an ICC-based Color Management system, you can get more accurate color from your digital files on an inkjet than you can with any traditional photographic print.
- With newer printers like the Epson R-800, you can get wider color-gamut prints than any photographic process.
- You could do all of this at home, anytime you like, without going anywhere. If you want to touch-up the print and redo it, you don't have to drive home to your computer and back.
- I don't have time to look this up for other printers, but the marginal cost of a 4 x 6 print with Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper and Ultrachrome inks on a desktop Epson printer is $0.31. Buy third party inks and papers, and I bet you can get it down to under $0.20.
Need more reasons? If you make many prints to amortize the cost of the printer, and are comfortable with the technology, is there any reason NOT to make your prints at home?
/unbiased information
Incidentally, this is where I throw in a shameless plug. If you want high quality, and maybe additional services that are hard to do yourself like making hardbound photo albums, and photo websites, and archiving, but you don't want to buy your own equipment and figure it all out yourself, try The Family Reserve.
Ack! Many traditional photo lab prints are FAR from archival. Many will fade horribly in as little as ten years under normal display conditions! Read up on Henry Wilhelm's research.
From the Bettman archives to the collections of the JFK presidential library, even the finest quality pictures have often suffered horrible degradation even under excellent storage conditions.
Things have gotten a lot better in the past several years, and a lot of labs use either Fuji Crystal Archive or Kodak Duralife papers, which do last quite well if treated properly. But be sure you check it out, don't just assume! For example, my step mother just bough very expensive professional studio portraits of her granddaughter, and they came back on papers that are known to degrade terribly in as little as 10 years.
In general, for most of the history of photography, assume things won't last unless you know otherwise, because it's generally proven to be the case.
If you don't want to research a place near you that uses quality, long-lasting processes, I believe that, among other places, Walmart uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper for all their prints.
I have an extremely intense hatred of HP's drivers for Macintosh. Which is too bad, because I otherwise love their equipment. They have really taken a beating and kept on going, with very high quality performance, in my experience. (Which entails three printers, one scanner, and one all-in-one.)
Without the HPIJS or GIMP-print drivers, my HP's would basically be paper weights, HP's drivers are so bad.
Still, after a long history with them, I've switched to Epson. Never buying HP again. I love that the open source community makes my HP stuff work, but when I pay for "Mac supported" hardware, I don't want to have to rely on the goodwill of others to make it work.
I'd like to point out that Canon isn't even close to being second to market here. The catch is, that all the other competitors provide third-party inks that also only work on Epson's piezoelectric inkjet printers.
Or a properly stored Mitsui (MDM-A) Gold Archival CD will last for over 200 years.
They're much more resistant to light, scratching, and plain old entropy than other CD's. They're the only digital media certified by the Library of Congress, and most other libraries, as an "archival medium."
The main problem companies have had with switching to archival inksets is this: the most effective known way to make archival inks is to use pigment based, as opposed to dye-based, inks. But pigment ink particles tend to be much larger than the particles in dyes. (Dye particles are 1-4 nanometers, pigment particles are 50 to 200 nanometers.) This usually changes the viscosity of the ink solution, and the larger particles can more easily gum up the print heads.You can grind them up smaller, but the smaller they get, the less archival they become.
One reason Epson is so far ahead in archival printing is that they're the only company using piezoelectric diaphragms in their print heads. Everyone else uses thermal print heads, which heat the ink in order to spray it out, which tends to gum up the print heads more easily anyway. In fact, every other brands' heads gum up so easily that they put disposable print heads on the print cartridge, where Epson printers come with permanent print heads. (Obviously, this allows them to make a killing on ink compared to the competition). This may be why Canon's only advertising a 30-year ink as opposed to Epson's 100-year Ultrachromes- they may have to grind up the pigments smaller to stop them from clogging in their thermal print heads.
So I wonder if these will be plug'n-play replacements for Canon's current printers, or if they're going to come out with a whole new line you have to buy to use these?
Epson released the first Archival printer, the 2000p, in the summer of 2000. And it was rated for 200 years light-fastness. It was followed in 2002 by the very popular Epson 2200, which used a newer 7-color archival pigmented ink set, prints up to 13 x 19, uses roll paper, does borderless printing on many sizes, and prints at 2880 x 2880 dpi with a minimum 3 picoliter droplet. It produces more crisp pictures than any photographic process except the laser exposures of the Durst Lambda.
They folowed that up in 2002 and 2003 with four large format archival printers of comparable print quality, the 4000, 7600, 9600, 10600, printing up to 44" wide by 100' long. All of these are rated at 100 years light-fastness.
Now, in 2004, they've released their third generation of archival printers, starting with the R-800, which is the first pigmented printer to produce true glossy prints without "bronzing," has a wider color gamut that any other consumer level printer of any photographic process, prints borderless sheets as well as CD's and DVD's, and prints at up to 5760 x 1440 with 1.5 picoliter droplets. These prints are also rated at 100 years.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that Canon's bringing on the competition, but is a new 30-year ink set four years after Epson's really big news in the industry? Epson dominates here, and with their huge range of printers that take ink sets good for 100 years or more, this isn't a very aggressive step for Canon.
Or, if you don't want to buy your own archival printer, or would like books instead of just prints, or need scanning and/or restoration, take a look at these guys:
The Family Reserve
Angostura's right that GIMP-print drivers might be worth looking into. But I have an OfficeJet G55xi, and the HPIJS drivers are by FAR the best. Better than anything by HP or in GIMP Print. You should give them a shot.
Slashdot Mirror
This happened again when I went out and got a job. The company was all Windows based, but we were still using NT in 2001, and we would frequently be emailed Office attachments in newer versions of Office we couldn't use. I'd have to forward the attachment to myself at home, go home for lunch and translate it on my Mac, then email it back to myself at work.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Bill would know what a pain in the ass it is for an operating system to have a bunch of divergent and not always compatible offerings available.
We'll see if that ones gets approved.
I think the "Art of Revenge" caption at the top refers to Lucas exacting revenge on Star Wars fans.
In case anyone's having trouble, this is not an advertisement.
Never the less, the executive order in question is reprehensible. Bush is using tenuous, illogical, religious grounds to justify denying a large category of funding to a promising area of scientific inquiry. Hundreds of potential stem cell lines for research are being destroyed daily from aborted fetuses. If Bush is in favor of destroying existing resources (human tissues) instead of using them to advance science and save lives, why not ban organ donation? Does anything in the bible say "thou shalt not help fund researching [new, human, embryonic] stem cells if thou art the [federal] government?" If this research is immoral, why only ban government funding, as opposed to all funding, or the research itself? If this is about abortion, why not oppose abortion, rather than research? Can anyone make sense of this policy? It scares me, not in how sweeping the effects are, but because The President, the "Leader of the Free World," is using executive orders to dictate where scientific research funding goes based on personal, nonsensical, unpopular religious motives.
I think the rest of government should do what the Pentagon does, and ignore it. There's no basis in law for "executive orders" anyway. I doubt any president would allow a case based on violating an executive order to go to court, in case the Supreme Court ruled that Executive orders don't exist. Chances are, Bush can't do anything but get grumpy if the whole Federal Government simply ignores his ban.
Since this article is mostly about lossless codecs and barely mentions the lossy ones, I don't see it as unusual that it doesn't mention AAC. It doesn't mention MP3 Pro, Real Audio, VQF, or many others, either.
The interesting information from Apple that it leaves out is about Apple Lossless Encoder. This is built into iTunes, so it's easy to rip to this format on both Macs and PC's. Obviously, it can be played back with iTunes too. It compresses to about 60%. It can be played back on the iPod, and it does support Apple's DRM scheme.
Another comparison of lossless formats, can be found here.
If the bright, saturated parts of the flowers looked more bright and more saturated on the Canon, than that was probably representative of a real difference between the capabilities of the printers. But if the whole image looked more "vivid" and less "flat" from the Canon; the grass, clouds, flower pot, or whatever else was in the picture, then what you were probably seeing was a poorly done print off the Epson, not an inherent limitation of the device. I'm sure it would only take me a few minutes, without messing with the image data, to find driver settings that would yield a flat, boring print of the picture on the Canon and a bright, vivid one on the Epson. If you did choose the Canon based on one poorly made Epson print, and the longevity of the prints is important to you, I feel bad for you that they'll be fading away in a few years.
But if you print a lot of pictures where flowers or other bright thing occupy a lot of the field of view, and you don't care much how your current prints look in 10, 20, or more years, then it sounds like you made the right choice. If you aren't selling the prints or anything, you can always reprint them when they fade, and by then, you'll probably have a printer with an even wider gamut and longer life. I just hope you made your choice for the right reasons, not based on one poorly made print from an Epson.
I'm sorry, that was supposed to read i9900 and "R800," not "SP2200." Those were the color spaces I was comparing in the previous post; you're right that the SP2200 has a smaller gamut than the i9900.
How many images that you want to print include colors that lie outside the color space of the SP2200 and inside the color space of the i9900? I'm guessing very few. If you aren't trying to print a picture of a rose or a stop sign, a set of crayons or a cookie-monster cake, then the SP2200 should be able to produce the exact same colors as the i9900. I don't believe gamut makes a difference for the majority of prints. Sure, it's important when you need it, and I'm all for a larger gamut. But if you randomly Google Image search up 1,000 photos, only a dozen or so are likely to contain colors that are out of gamut on the SP2200. And of those colors, only a few of them will be in gamut on the i9900. So if the prints on the i9900 are regularly "more vibrant," and you're not trying to print an image dominated by supersaturated primaries, then there is probably something wrong with how the prints were made. With good profiles and the same paper, most prints should look very similar on those printers.
Don't be silly, I'm sure your friends weren't lying to you. But have you compared prints of the same image on the same paper on the two printers, printed with good ICC profiles? I suspect there are as many people out there whos friends say their Canon can't match the Epson prints for being "vibrant." As for store samples, I don't think anyone was bribed, but were you looking at the same picture? Epson generally tries to sell to artists, and a lot of their sample prints I've seen are faces and such, where you don't want to turn up the contrast and saturation to huge levels. They aren't going for "vibrant," they're going for "realistic." I bet that for the i9900, with its 8-color extended gamut ink set, Canon uses test prints that look like the "after" in the Claritin ads. this is born out by looking at their advertising samples online- Epson uses the bald guy in the steel square, Canon uses a race-car driver with super-saturated primary logos all over the place, and a completely unrealistic enhanced green grass in the background (gotta show off that green).
If you're referring to anything other than extremely saturated primary colors, then I'm interested to see what you think this quality is that you call "vibrant." You said the Epson inks have darker blacks, and the paper dictates the whites, so if anything, the Epson should have a greater contrast range. It seems to be generally agreed on review sites that dot densities over about 2-3 million dots/inch^2 don't make any visible difference. The only factor left would be the droplet size. The i9900 does have a droplet half the volume of the 2200, which could produce smoother gradients, which is important to the perception of depth in pictures, and you did say the Epson prints look "flat." But the Epson has light cyan, light magenta, and light black, which the i9900 doesn't, which should make up for the larger droplet size.
I can't say that I've seen the same image printed on the i9900 and the SP2200 to compare. I know the SP2200 can make gorgeous prints. I can get prints out of it that look better than prints from custom photo labs off the same negative. But maybe the i9900 is better. There's always going to be something better. I suspect Epson's replacement for the SP2200 will be better than the i9900. And I hope Canon's replacement for the i9900 is better than the Epson at the time. Just like computers, there's always something better comming along. If you can get gorgeous prints, from your own desk and at an affordable price, that look better and last longer than most methods devised by man in the 150 year history of photography, then I'd think you'd be happy. But yes, I'm sure the prints in the future will look even better than the prints today, and I'm sure that some printers will continue to be better at some things and others will be best at othe
What about an Epson 1280 with Lyson Fotonic inks and a CIS?
It seems to meet all your criteria.
- Well under $700 ( $300)
- Lasts well over 10 years
- Prints 13 x 19's
- Has a wide gamut with bright colors
- Makes excellent prints (without any "bronzing") on both Matte and Glossy papers
- And, as I listed above, works well with Lyson's CIS system.
Of course some of the sprays are also known to slightly change the color tones too
The sprays slightly increase the contrast by making the blacks appear darker. That's all. If you think they actually change the colors, get your ICC profile made with a coated printed target. But they don't shift the colors, they just extend the contrast ratio a little further into black.
As for the colors, a color profiling system with a spectrophotometer can measure the average difference (delta) between the output (print) and the input (original digital file), and inkjets are the best I'm aware of, when used with a well-run color ICC color management system, at producing accurate color prints. It's true that traditional photographic processes still beat most inkjet prints in some areas of color gamut, like bright reds. But the new printers, such as the Epson R800 and the Canon i9900, with their 8-color inksets, are beginning to surpass traditional prints on color gamut. Again, the inkjet's color gamut has been growing much faster than the color gamut on traditional photographic methods.
As for the "film look," I think that given enough fiddling, a new, professional inkjet can produce pictures that are indistinguishable under fairly close scrutiny from their photographic process counterparts. I don't know exactly what you're referring to, but a lot of people refer to "the film look" as a greater appearance of depth in the picture. This is often due to smoother gradients, particularly in skin tones, that make the picture "jump out of the page" compared to flatter-looking inkjet prints with less smooth gradients. But since about two years ago, I don't think these constraints have really applied to the best new inkjets. My Epson 2200 can make pictures with every bit as much "depth" as I've seen in a photographic print. But my HP that prints at 1200 x 1200 DPI with larger (8 picoliter?) droplets can't compete at all, with either the Epson SP2200 or a photographic process print. Have you seen professional prints from machines like the SP2200, R800, or Canon i9900? I think you'll find they capture the photographic "feel." But you're right that if you go back in time much farther than these printers, inkjet prints were certainly missing something. I'm sure that for years we'll be seeing people referring to using authentic high-quality photographic processes, not crappy inkjet technology, simply because people aren't keeping up with the times. I'm not accusing you of this, you're well informed, but within the next five years or so, I bet that sometime, you'll take a look at the best new inkjet prints, and conclude that traditional photographic prints don't have anything to better to offer.
Well, the i9900 does give the R800 a run for it's money on gamut. The i9900 has a better green gamut all around, and beats the R800 on dark reds and pinks. But the R800 has a significant advantage in blues, indigos, and violets, as well as saturated yellows and yellowish greens. It's hard to tell which color gamut covers a larger total volume in an animated 3D rendering, but it's a close call. They both certainly have their advantages and disadvantages. I have to admit I haven't kept up that closely with Canon, and didn't realize they were using an 8-color inkset now. (Although I know it's been 10 months since Canon's press release.) Yes, it's competitive in gamut, and resolution (i9900 at 11 million dpi^2 and the Epson at 8 million dpi^2, both of which are arbitrarily high) and minimum droplet size (i9900 at 2 picoliter, R800 at 1.5 picoliter.) But it's not at all comparable in longevity, if that's something that you care about.
As for the "bronzing" issue. Yes, the spray does fix the bronzing issue. The reason you get the "bronzing" with Ultrachrome inks is that the inks are thicker and they actually lay down a thick coating of ink that sit on top of the UltraCrome compatible microporous-coated inkjet papers. Since the paper is glossy, and the ink puts down such a thick layer on top that it does not fully soak into the paper, you can see it standing on top and it looks matte comapred to the paper. Putting a glossy layer on top of the ink completely fixes the problem. Yes, I've seen this first hand. Yes, other people have seen this first hand. And yes, it is marketed by experts for this quality. It's the exact same thing that the new R800 does to solve the problem- put down a glossy layer on top of the matte ink. Therefore the whole print surface is glossy- problem solved. Since I've done this dozens of times, and it works, I'm curious what your evidence is that makes you say "Sorry, but a "protective spray" doesn't fix the bronzing issue"
As for underestimating the seriousness of the problem- I made a series of 8.5 x 11 prints, including some with lots of blacks, on papers known to exhibit the problem (including Epson Premium Glossy Photo paper), and showed them to a group of 8 people. First I asked for comments without mentioning the bronzing effect. No one mentioned anything like it. Then I told them about the effect, and asked them if they could see it. Only one out of eight people said they could see this effect on their own, without me suggesting they angle the paper. These people were sitting around a table in a room with multiple bright lights, passing the prints around, so it's not like I was controlling the lighting or viewing angle. And that one person who saw it thought it was cool! They said it brought out details in the darkest regions of the print that they otherwise could not see, and gave it a "3D look." I have looked at a lot (a thousand?) prints from the 2200, and including hundreds of black and white prints, where the bronzing is supposed to be most noticeable. Unless the light catches it at certain angles, the problem is completely invisible. With a controlled viewing angle where you don't get glare off the paper, I defy anyone to tell me if a print was made with ultrachromes or not based on seeing "bronzing." I've got otherwise identical glossy prints right here in front of me as I type, from an Epson 2200 and an HP, and I can't see the difference unless I tilt the pages to get glare off the light. Even with a magnifying glass. And I'm using a bright, diffuse, flourescent light- which is supposed to be the worst viewing conditions for bringing out the problem. Have you actually seen this problem, to be so sure that "the problem is more severe then then you're suggesting"?
I also wanted to add that pigment based inkjet inks from DuPont have now also surpassed the color gamut of dye-based inks on professional as well as desktop printers.
I guess it relies on its ionization, except it's OK if it's pH neutral, or maybe a little bit basic, or maybe a little bit acidic?
Do you have any references for this idea that all inkjet printers use ionized ink? It's true that the IRIS (now IXIA) printers use continuous-flow inkjet printing, where the ink is ionized and the droplets are "steered" by running them past charging plates and deflection plates. But most inkjets use thermal printing, where the ink is rapidly heated in the print head to make a bubble, which pressurizes the ink and squirts it out the nozzle. It is only aimed based on careful positioning of the print head. Epson, and some high-end professional printers like Roland, use piezoelectric printing. The piezoelectric effect is where a mechanical stress occurs in a material due to an electrical charge. A small piezoelectric diagram forces the ink out through a narrow (10 micron) orifice. Again, dot-placement is controlled by careful print-head placement, not by electric plates guiding ionized ink.
In fact, while Epson and HP's ink formulations are not known, there are many third-party ink sellers who do list their formulations, and they tend to be rather clear about the fact that they de-ionize the carrier (water) before making the inks. And they don't add anything ionized. Yet, these non-ionized inks work with these printers. How is that? Fuji also mentions that only a few expensive large-format printers use ionized ink.
Even if the inks were ionized, it is entirely unclear that oxidation would break down the large color particles in pigment based inks like Ultrachrome inks. Your arguments fail to address this. Pigmented inks are what were used in classical oil paintings, many of which have been displayed without glass since the renaisance, probably without significant fading. During this time, they've been heavily oxidized. You do not present any case that adding an ionizing agent to the ink would accellerate the breakdown of the pigments to make the inks significantly unstable. Do you have any research, or math, or arguments as to what makes you think that the addition of any ionizing agent would break down any conceivable pigment too quickly to make it stable?
"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."
Yes, that's why, at least with dye-based inkjet inks, the paper is critically important to the life of the prints. The paper is the binder. There are two main types of inkjet photopaper coatings. Microporous coated papers provide the least protection against oxidation. Still, good microporous papers, like the microcermaic coatings invented by Asahi Glass, allow large amounts of ink to be deposited with quick drying and without smudging, and the more ink, the more it can oxidize without changing. They use tiny ceramic (alumnia sol) particles in a silca gel, which rapidly sequesters the ink. Viewed under a microscope, this paper looks like jagged mountains. This is how they gather enough ink to "provide a stable layer of pigment." That's why these papers are usually used with more stable inks, they don't protect the ink much, but they take a whole lot of it into the paper.
Swellable Polymer papers use a nonporous coating of organic polymers that are water-receptive and SWELL TO SURROUND THE INK after it hits the paper. The majority of the ink is completely protected from direct air exposure. How do the inks oxidize, then?
Kodak has managed to combine these two approaches in their latest Ultima Picture Paper, which both takes a heavy coating of ink and en
A wide carriage version of something better is certainly coming, and it will surely include the new higher quality gloss. They aren't going to just stop development with the current generation of printers. Anyway, the "bronzing" is only visible when the image is held at certain angles to the light, and those are the same angles where you get glare off glossy paper anyway. But it is admittedly a weakness. However, if it actually bothers you, you can fix it right now off any Epson print with an archival glossy protective spray, like PremierArt Print Shield or Lyson Print Guard Spray.
And no, the R800 does NOT have a wider color gammet then any other consumer level printer. Dye based inks are still superior in that regard. The only thing the R800 does is add an 8th tank of "gloss enhancer" which helps reduce but doesn't completely eliminate the bronzing effect on glossy paper- it doesn't change the gammut.
Well, thanks for correcting my statistics on the Epson 2200, I did have some numbers wrong. But I'm surprised you'd be so nitpicky on that, and immediately follow it up contradicting me with complete misinformation about the R800. Since the R800 has 1.5 picoliter droplets and 5760 x 1440 resolution, they no longer have to use "light" colors to achieve smooth gradients. So they dropped light black, light magenta, and light cyan from the Ultrachrome inkset, and in place of those three, they added Red, Blue, and gloss optimizer. With the addition of red and blue inks, the R800 can cover almost the entire SRGB color space, plus a whole lot more green and blue. Epson claims it prints a 19% larger gamut than HP's dye-based Photosmart 8450. Can you name any printer that covers a larger color space than the R800, without going up to giant professional printers like the 12-color Colorspan DisplayMaker Mach 12?
Hmm, let's see.
- A good inkjet print, like with Epson's Ultrachromes, will last as long or longer.
- Good inkjets now produce sharper prints than any photographic process except the laser exposures of the Durst Lambda. The newest generation or the next may surpass even it. Oh, and good luck finding a local lab with one of those anyway.
- With an ICC-based Color Management system, you can get more accurate color from your digital files on an inkjet than you can with any traditional photographic print.
- With newer printers like the Epson R-800, you can get wider color-gamut prints than any photographic process.
- You could do all of this at home, anytime you like, without going anywhere. If you want to touch-up the print and redo it, you don't have to drive home to your computer and back.
- I don't have time to look this up for other printers, but the marginal cost of a 4 x 6 print with Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper and Ultrachrome inks on a desktop Epson printer is $0.31. Buy third party inks and papers, and I bet you can get it down to under $0.20.
Need more reasons? If you make many prints to amortize the cost of the printer, and are comfortable with the technology, is there any reason NOT to make your prints at home?
/unbiased information
Incidentally, this is where I throw in a shameless plug. If you want high quality, and maybe additional services that are hard to do yourself like making hardbound photo albums, and photo websites, and archiving, but you don't want to buy your own equipment and figure it all out yourself, try The Family Reserve.
From the Bettman archives to the collections of the JFK presidential library, even the finest quality pictures have often suffered horrible degradation even under excellent storage conditions. Things have gotten a lot better in the past several years, and a lot of labs use either Fuji Crystal Archive or Kodak Duralife papers, which do last quite well if treated properly. But be sure you check it out, don't just assume! For example, my step mother just bough very expensive professional studio portraits of her granddaughter, and they came back on papers that are known to degrade terribly in as little as 10 years.
In general, for most of the history of photography, assume things won't last unless you know otherwise, because it's generally proven to be the case.
If you don't want to research a place near you that uses quality, long-lasting processes, I believe that, among other places, Walmart uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper for all their prints.
Without the HPIJS or GIMP-print drivers, my HP's would basically be paper weights, HP's drivers are so bad.
Still, after a long history with them, I've switched to Epson. Never buying HP again. I love that the open source community makes my HP stuff work, but when I pay for "Mac supported" hardware, I don't want to have to rely on the goodwill of others to make it work.
There's Lyson, InkJet Mall's generic, Luminos, Jet Tec, and Media Street.
I'm probably missing some, too.
They're much more resistant to light, scratching, and plain old entropy than other CD's. They're the only digital media certified by the Library of Congress, and most other libraries, as an "archival medium."
Here's some more info and a place to buy them.
One reason Epson is so far ahead in archival printing is that they're the only company using piezoelectric diaphragms in their print heads. Everyone else uses thermal print heads, which heat the ink in order to spray it out, which tends to gum up the print heads more easily anyway. In fact, every other brands' heads gum up so easily that they put disposable print heads on the print cartridge, where Epson printers come with permanent print heads. (Obviously, this allows them to make a killing on ink compared to the competition). This may be why Canon's only advertising a 30-year ink as opposed to Epson's 100-year Ultrachromes- they may have to grind up the pigments smaller to stop them from clogging in their thermal print heads.
So I wonder if these will be plug'n-play replacements for Canon's current printers, or if they're going to come out with a whole new line you have to buy to use these?
Epson released the first Archival printer, the 2000p, in the summer of 2000. And it was rated for 200 years light-fastness. It was followed in 2002 by the very popular Epson 2200, which used a newer 7-color archival pigmented ink set, prints up to 13 x 19, uses roll paper, does borderless printing on many sizes, and prints at 2880 x 2880 dpi with a minimum 3 picoliter droplet. It produces more crisp pictures than any photographic process except the laser exposures of the Durst Lambda.
They folowed that up in 2002 and 2003 with four large format archival printers of comparable print quality, the 4000, 7600, 9600, 10600, printing up to 44" wide by 100' long. All of these are rated at 100 years light-fastness.
Now, in 2004, they've released their third generation of archival printers, starting with the R-800, which is the first pigmented printer to produce true glossy prints without "bronzing," has a wider color gamut that any other consumer level printer of any photographic process, prints borderless sheets as well as CD's and DVD's, and prints at up to 5760 x 1440 with 1.5 picoliter droplets. These prints are also rated at 100 years.
Don't get me wrong, it's nice that Canon's bringing on the competition, but is a new 30-year ink set four years after Epson's really big news in the industry? Epson dominates here, and with their huge range of printers that take ink sets good for 100 years or more, this isn't a very aggressive step for Canon.
Disclaimer- I am very much affiliated with them.
Angostura's right that GIMP-print drivers might be worth looking into. But I have an OfficeJet G55xi, and the HPIJS drivers are by FAR the best. Better than anything by HP or in GIMP Print. You should give them a shot.