The Return of "Power Printing For The People" Part II, the Revenge of the Son of the Sequel
by Eolake Stobblehouse
(This article has been expanded. The additional data about the new Epson printers is added at the bottom.)
I am very excited. I haven't slept for a week, and I am wandering the streets at night, trying to find a pub which serve decent coffee. I am chattering aimlessly at friends, neighbors, and local merchants about "dpi", "reflective range", and "ink absorbtion".
I just got a color printer. I did not expect it to do that much for me. Firstly, I had one a couple of years ago, which even did A3, and which was state of the art regarding Photo Quality then. But at the same time I got on the Net, and discovered that it was a much more powerful way of reaching people than things on paper. So I hardly used it, and it was not that convincing anyway. Secondly, I only got a printer because I am starting in on photography again, and I felt I needed something solid to give to models.
I have been into art since I could walk. Drawing, painting, photography, just to mention the visual ones. And I have exhibited many times in many different kinds of places. And I have sold quite some. But one thing happens too often for it to be funny: People tell me that they really love a work... It means something to them. But they simply cannot afford it. Dental care or something comes first, which is sad, but understandable.
Of course there is one simple solution: Reproduction. Which is great, but has one problem: price. To get something printed in good quality is very very expensive. For a while there has been a rather affordable alternative: Photocopies. Which is actually great, if the originals are black-and-white line art. I actually had a whole exhibition with only that. The very cheap reproductions I sold will last 200 years and looked great. But if you want color, well... they don't last, I am sorry. You are very lucky if they last 5 years without fading or color shift. And of course taking money for something that fades after a couple of years is a doubtful proposition.
The same thing has been true about inkjet color prints. You can do things on a computer which artists of old would have sold their souls for. And in the last few years, printers have come forth which at a cheap price give prints that look absolutely great. But still... they do not last.
Until now. And this just happened, in February/March 2000.
... If you ever wondered about your suspicion that Art is not quite important to society as it should be, I will have you know this: Most of the research into lightfast colors have been made in the automobile industry. If that had not been done, we may not have had permanent colors for fine artists to use at all! Similar with the printers. Starting with the Epson Stylus Color 720 dpi printer in 1994, all color printers at a reasonable price were only made for the office market. Permanence of the prints was not considered at all, and it was a great surprise to Epson and the others that they suddenly found themselves in a rapidly expanding market of printing photographs and art!
All the big manufacturors (Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark) have come out with great new models recently, but only Epson (so far) has taken the permanence bull by the horns and made printers specifically designed for photos and art that last. Which are the Epson Stylus Photo 870 (for A4) and 1270 (for A3).
I was originally going for a new Canon printer that sounded like the cat's meow, but imagine my horror and confusion when I began to lose track of how many people I had talked to at Canon, and still could not get close to any kind of statement of the permanence of the prints. So Canon was dropped.
You have to understand that this is a real issue. According to test made by the independent company Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc., most printer-ink-paper combinations last only for a couple of years without fading. And this is behind glass, and no exposure to sunlight whatsoever. In contrast to this, the new Epson printer/ink, in combination with the optimum paper for it, is tested to over 20 years. Which is better than many other kinds of materials, certainly color photos included, and which is a professional range for a fine artist.
In addition to all that, and rather importantly, the prints look grrrrrrrreat! I have a lot of experience with art in general and photography in particular, and I tell you that while it may be possible for real masters of the darkroom to make photographic prints that look better than these prints, I know how hard this is to do, and I am not holding my breath for uncle Frank to do it. And this is not even getting into things like color photographs being way harder to make in a darkroom, and more expensive, and the fact that each little manipulation in the darkroom has to be repeated for each copy, while the digital file stays the same after you have made it perfect. ...Aaaaand the space for the darkroom, and the toxic chemicals, etc. etc.
In other words, this is actually not a small revolution for the artist. You can now spend a month on a work of art, and sell as many copies as you want, in great quality, and good permanence, and in small numbers, for a price that an ordinary household can afford. This has not happened before.
And just as a tip if you actually get a printer like this: For max permanence you need the Matte Heavyweight paper. If looks are more important than hard-core permanence, and particularly for photographs, go for the Premium Glossy Photo Paper (remember Premium). This tests at only about ten years, but I would have sworn that it came from a top-of-the-notch darkroom, or from a printer costing fifty times as much as the little thing standing next to my computer. Not even seasoned veterans of art photography would reject this as being inferior, if they saw it in an exhibition.
I have printed color photos from digital camera, black-and-white photos from my archives, and computer art with flat colors. Particularly with the latter, I was nervous that there would be lines in the flat areas. Not even a hint that appeared, it all looks spec-frigging-tacular. No grains or dots either, you would need a strong magnifying glass to notice them, if your last birthday had double digits. (I have to add that surely the competition's high-end prints look as good, the Epson's main reason d'etre is the lightfastness.)
Prices. The 870 machine is currently about £300 here in Britain. Probably a similar number of dollars in the US. I have not made great calculations of the price of printing, but it seems like you can make an A4 picture for something like a buck or two, depending on paper and whatnot. And I don't think darkroom materials can match that these days.
It's a brand new world. Go wild.
Update: I have no experience with the newest Canon printers. I am sure the quality of the prints is very high. But so far it is only Epson's 870 and 1270 models that offer prints lasting long enough to justify selling them as original art. Which is 10 or 20 years, depending on the paper.
But I have seen a test comparing the Epson with a HP. And what I noticed was that the dots were much coarser on the HP.
One thing I suddenly remembered was that a few years ago (mid-nineties), after I had gotten my Mac and gone wild with digital art, I tried to find a way to get it printed out in good-looking quality. I tried more than one professional outlet, and I used a bit of time and money on it. And I failed. Completely. The prints, made with machines costing more than luxury automobiles and operated by professionals, looked like doo-doo. I just couldn't use them.
Contrast this with my new Epson 870. Despite it being new, and despite me experimenting with different media and settings, I not only have no failed prints yet, they also look fabulous. They not only look "good for something coming from an amateur machine", they look orders of magnitude better than those prints from the big machines of yesteryear, and better than almost anything I have seen come from a darkroom.
Evidence that I am not alone: In the brand new issue of Professional Photographer, there are two articles mentioning this. One is about an Irish photographer who is delirious with the advantages going digital has given him. And he says: "It is scary going digital, because no-one has anything to show you. If someone had sent me an A3 Epson print, I wouldn't have questioned it. They are just incredible -- I haven't seen a photographic print as good."
And in the same issue there is a test of the Epson 1270 model, which is the A3+ version of the 870. It is by Steve Hynes, a veteran pro. His conclusion is: "The last generation of Epson Stylus Photo printers brought inkjet technology to the point where quality was no longer an issue. And the range of media types has put an end to the idea that inkjet could never look or feel like photographs. That left only the longevity of the prints to conquer. Now, there has been a giant stride in that area with the new inks and media. That little black room with the smelly chemicals is starting to look increasingly redundant."
I should perhaps add the information that while other technologies than inkjet (color laser printers for instance) have not typically had the bright colors of the inkjet, they have long had better longevity. This is because they use pigments instead of dyes. Pigments are insoluble, and so has bigger particles than dyes, which are soluble. This means their lightfastness is much better. But an inkjet printer has fantastically small noozles, and so has to use dyes instead of pigments. And it has taken years longer to bring dyes up to the lightfastness needed without sacrificing color intensity. But this has apparently happened now.
- Stobblehouse |
