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May 17, 2007
[MR WILHELM'S DURABLE PICTURES]
HENRY WILHELM, THE WORLD'S EXPERT on photographic print durability, was in town last week for the PMA show. He was a guest of Epson, although he takes no fee from the company for being here. Epson love him because he consistently rates inkjet prints made with their pigment inks near the top of the chart.
In his accelerated print deterioration tests Hewlett Packard and Lexmark do better than Epson in the standard 10 by 15cm part of the market, but the margins are small. Each company is now producing ink and paper combinations that will produce prints with a life expectancy of more than 200 years when kept in an album.
What sparked Imaging’s interest in Mr Wilhelm’s visit is his broadside attack on third party inks and papers. The accelerated deterioration tests at Wilhelm laboratories show that the differences between the consumables from the original equipment manufacturers and those from third party suppliers are extreme. Where a Hewlett Packard Photosmart printer with genuine paper and ink will produce prints that last 42 years, displayed without protection, the same printer with refilled cartridges and generic paper will make prints that fade in three months.
It is common sales talk in the shops to be told that all inks come from the one big vat and that the only difference between OEM and refills is the brand, for which you are paying a fortune.
Wilhelm says: “This is definitely not so. Why would you think it could be so?” Well, because we are canny customers and we just know that the manufacturers are cheating us, don’t we?
Wilhelm explains: “The problem is that it is very easy to make an ink that has bright colours so long as you ignore permanence. Putting those two things together is very difficult to do. The major manufacturers have devoted a tremendous amount of investment and research into doing what is difficult to do – which is to make an ink set that has a wide colour gamut, has bright colour and also permanence. So far there is no example of a third party ink that has managed to do that.”
Calidad markets a pigment ink for Epson printers in Australia that has been tested by Wilhelm laboratories. This ink promises “permanence” on the box. Wilhelm’s comparative tests show the Epson original unfaded after 50 years of exposure to light and ozone while the Calidad prints show deterioration after a year.
Henry Wilhelm became interested in photographic print durability when he was with the Peace Corps in Bolivia in the 1960s. He was taking photographs of people living in transition from traditional to more modern life styles and he knew he was capturing historic images on colour film that was inherently unstable.
A period working with Ansel Adams as his assistant also made him aware of the importance of print durability. As a result of that experience he invented and patented a multi-pass print washing machine, eventually adopted by Adams himself.
In 1993, together with his wife, Carol Brower, he wrote the text book on The permanence and care of colour photographs.
The good news from the Wilhelm Imaging Research laboratories is that prints produced on some inkjet printers, using the manufacturers’ paper and pigment inks or latest dye inks, will last longer than traditional silver halide prints.
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Posted by terry at May 17, 2007 06:07 AM
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