Digital BW, The Print

This reminds me of the early reports of Epson "Archival Matte" yellowing in 6 months of Florida display.  The heat and humidity there seems to show the weaknesses of our papers before the rest of us see anything.

Mark Savoia <mark@...> wrote:
>
> Take the print and expose it to direct sunlight for a few hours, the yellow should lesson if not completely disappear.

Great, just what we want to do with our prints, and just what we want to tell our customers.

> It is a airborne or contact contamination. I think silver rag has been redesigned since then, it should happen at a lesser degree now.

I think we need to know exactly what is going on.  Is it an acidic reaction or some airborne pollution?  

I ripped open a Museo Silver Rag and tested the interior paper (again) with my acid test pen, and the interior paper seems to be well buffered.  The coated surface is not, which I think is rather typical of these types of papers.  

I've seen edge yellowing on my stored silver prints, presumably from air-borne acids.  However, with the buffered inkjet papers, this problem was, hopefully, taken care of.  I doubt the interior paper is being attacked by acids, but I don't know.

From my perspective, it's one more piece of evidence that we really have no idea how long these inkjet papers are going to last.  Thanks to http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/ we have lots of information about image fading, but that is only part of the story.  If the substrate fails, the lightfastness of the image on it becomes rather irrelevant.  

At this point, I'm not sure I have any more confidence in the longevity of the inkjet glossy papers than I did in the wet darkroom RC papers.  I have slightly more confidence in the matte inkjet papers, but I don't really trust the coatings on them either. 

Once again, I must say the 100% carbon pigment images on Arches watercolor paper that hang on my walls make me very happy.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com