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They come alive with what seems like a
surfaceless presence; the image appears to be in the
surface of the print, not on it. The image has a
third dimension, depth, that it cannot have in a
traditional print.
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technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and
commentaries, continuously available online since
1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Epson's pigmented-ink printers and professional matte
paper make spectacular fade-free photo
prints
July 6, 2003
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard
My wife was blue in the face. I was
sickly green. My cat was supposed to be black with a little
white diamond on his forehead, but he was an ugly purple
with yellow markings.
Nearly all the prints we'd made from
our digital pictures took on this sort of ghoulish look
after they started fading. Family portraits made us look
like the Munsters, and some of my treasured prints from our
week-long walking tour of Paris looked like they'd been
taken beneath the sea.
Was there a way out of this absurdity?
Digital photos cost a lot to print when you add the cost of
ink and paper. Shouldn't they last longer without
turning sickly shades of blue and green?
The answer is simple. You make a printer
that uses paint instead of ink.
Printer companies don't call such a
magic ink formula "paint," of course. That would
scare buyers away in a hurry. They call it "pigmented
ink." Inkjet pigments are tiny colored particles
suspended in liquid. Regular ink is made from colored
dyes.
Pigments aren't chemicals and
don't fade the way the chemicals in dye-based ink do.
But a big problem kept most pigmented inks out of the
consumer market until recently. Pigmented inks didn't
settle into the fibers of inkjet paper very well. They
tended to sit on top, adding an unflattering metallic sheen
to parts of photos.
Epson, the leading manufacturer of
inkjet printers, solved that problem when it introduced the
model 2000P photo-quality printer about a year ago. The
company also designed a companion matte-finish paper for
the 2000P, originally called Archival Matte (now called
Enhanced Matte). The 2000P's matte-finish photos should
last three-quarters of a century or more without fading,
according to experts who have tested Epson's claims of
extremely stable prints.
(The 2000P has been replaced by the
model 2200, but they work very much the same.)
Epson's new matte paper absorbs
pigmented ink exceptionally well. As you might expect,
photos printed on Enhanced Matte paper look slightly dull
until you mount them under glass, in a suitable frame.
Displayed that way, they come alive with what seems like a
surfaceless presence; the image appears to be in the
surface of the print, not on it. The image has a
third dimension, depth, that it cannot have in a
traditional print.
Print quality such as this isn't
cheap. The Epson 2000P might still be available -- it was
selling in refurbished-but-as-new condition on eBay
recently for $365, about a third of its list price -- but
the 2200 isn't being discounted much below its $700
list price. Epson's Enhanced Matte paper lists for $18
for a pack of 50 letter-size sheets, but I've found it
for about $12 using a Google search. Both the 2000P and the
2200 can handle much larger paper, too, in both sheets and
rolls. The efficiency of using rolls of paper can bring
down the cost quite a bit.
The prints I get from my Epson 2000P
using the company's "Enhanced Matte" paper
aren't just good; they might well be museum-quality.
One of those prints, a digital photo I took of a tiny
salamander sunning itself on a rusted car in the
Everglades, will be shown at the Everson Museum of Art in
Syracuse this fall. (I'll put a notice of the date of
the exhibition on my Web site later this summer.)
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