Digital BW, The Print

> USI 1.3 mil glossy laminate, the thinnest available. 
>According to Dr. Work, the best method of protecting pigment 
>inkjet prints (if you don't mind the look of it) is to laminate.   
>...

I suspect laminates can do a very good job, in part due to their thickness.
The machines that are needed to apply the laminates may be out of reach for
most amateur B&W printers, however.  Also, I'm not sure about the aesthetics
of these products.

Because most of the fading seems to be oxidation, promoted by light,
humidity, pollutants and various other oxidizers, I have searched for and
asked a number of chemical company technical reps about what, if any,
coating would be the best barrier to simply keep these gases away from the
pigments.  Sadly, the best barriers are not suitable as coatings due to
limited longevity, yellowing, and other problems.  For example, there
appears to be no epoxy that doesn't yellow and isn't brittle.  

Glass appears to still be the ultimate.

Short of that, however, I think we can have significant protection from the
available coatings.  Among those, the solvent based acrylics, with Rolm &
Haas's B72 being the best known, have been tested to 400 years and are very
non-yellowing.  I suspect PremierArt is one of these.  

A major advantage of solvent based sprays is that they surround the
particles much better than the water-borne coatings, which have been
characterized to me as more like blankets that just lay on top of the
particles.  Especially on matte papers, this allows the gasses free access
to the particles through the back of the paper, unless that is also sealed
some way.  I would recommend a solvent-based acrylic spray prior to applying
water-borne coatings.

Among the water-borne coatings, the cross-linking of the polyurethanes
should make them a better barrier than the acrylic.  The cross-linking
should also help avoid the tackiness that the water-borne coatings are prone
to exhibit.  The aliphatic Hydrocote PUR should be very non-yellowing and
was recommended to me by a technical representative of a competitor that had
tested a number of such products.

I don't know what these laminates are composed of.  I would suspect that
they can be much better gas barriers than the water-borne coatings.  

To deal with the aesthetic issues, I have experimented with thin plastics
that are applied over matte papers on a vacuum easel.  I never found the
materials and/or technique that resulted in an acceptable print, but the
concept of the vacuum to pull the thin plastic down so tightly that the
paper texture showed and the surface looked less plastic showed promise.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com