Interview with Henry Wilhelm on print permanence
 

Background: among other things I'm a chemist and have also had an
education in parts reliability. Failure rates of parts can be
accelerated by testing at temperatures higher than the design
temperature range, then corrected for normal use using Arrhenius' Law.
The same testing acceleration could be done for temperature interactions
with photo prints, then corrected back to "normal" conditions.

The average digital photo guy prints his photo on good, not archival
paper (is there such a thing as archival paper for inkjets?). The things
that fade prints include light, chemical interactions with the paper,
and possible chemical interactions with mounting materials or fingerprints.

There is a lot of high end papers for inkjets, cotton base acid free.


This stuff can all be tested in the short term by increasing temperature
or (in the case of light) by using higher intensity light.

While Wilhelm did his test with Epson inks versus generic inks, the same
could be done with HP ink, Canon ink, toner, and so forth.

Personal experience with Epson and HP jet inks is that they both fade in
normal room light. I have an HP printer right now, mostly because they
seem to last longer than Epson printers. No experience with Canon.

You haven't used the high end inkjet materials, pigment ink greatly
enhances life expectancy, past that of color photos. What you have
seen is dye inks, without special swellable emulsion papers (this came
from the Epson ink fiasco) dye inks just don't last. Most papers are
not swellable, though dye prints will generally list the papers that
will work best with their inks. We ahve 4 or 5 years old prints from a
dye ink printer on swellable emulsion papers. HPs is HP Premium Photo
paper, Epson's used to be called Epson Colorlife paper it wa
savailable in gloss and luster finishes. Ilford has Gallerie Classic
in gloss and luster for dye inks.

Tom