Digital BW, The Print

Luke,

The 49-year figure was from 1999 RIT testing on MIS color pigment 
inks and the 49-year point was for the yellow ink, which was the 
weakest. The black in that ink set was still going strong at that 
point. I would guess that at that point in time the black ink was 
perhaps similar to the black in the MIS Original Quads, which is more 
prone to fading than the current MIS grayscale inks.

If you extrapolate the black ink from that trial onwards towards the 
65% fail point you should hit a couple of hundred years.

Unfortunately there is not a lot of good data on all the different 
inks and I don't believe that the data is very meaningful in terms of 
real time but only useful in comparing one ink to another but this is 
only valid if the testing was the same. Comparing RIT years to 
Wilhelm years is probably useless.

In John Paul Caponigro review of the 2200, 7600 and 9600 he gave the 
following Wilhelm "longevity ratings" for the UltraChrome inks:

Premium Glossy Photo Paper - 90+ years
Somerset Velvet for Epson - 80+ years
Premium Luster Photo Paper - 50+ years
Premium Semimatte Photo Paper - 40+ years
Enhanced Matte Paper - 30+ years

So you can see that paper choice plays a major part in in all of this.

I have sent the step wedges to Paul Roark to stick in his fade tester 
with some MIS and Piezo wedges so hopefully we will get some real 
comparative performance info in a few weeks.

Bottom line the 2200 inks appear to be a hybrid of pigments and dyes 
where the grayscale inks MIS and Piezo are hybrids of carbon and 
small amounts of colored pigment. We do know for certain that 
pigments outlast dyes so I think I am safe in going with these inks 
for the long haul. I, unfortunately, will not be around to know for 
sure.

Martin Wesley


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Luke Granfield" 
<luke@l...> wrote:
> Martin,
> 
> As far as life of the MIS-VM prints are concerned I only see 49 
years on the
> MIS web site. And isn't Ultrachrome rated on watercolor paper rated 
at
> 90-100? What am I missing here?
> 
> Luke
> 
> >
> > For myself I will stick with Selenium PT, MIS-VM or WN-PT because 
I prefer
> > the hue of those inks, they exhibit more chromatic complexity 
than the
> 2200
> > prints and the life of the 2200 prints is not acceptable to me. I 
would
> like
> > to have a 2200 for color work, but for B&W I would still 
recommend a 1280
> > and a grayscale ink for desktop printing.
> >
> > Martin Wesley