Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, hogarth 
<hogarth@s...> wrote:
> I found a paper written a while back by Henry Wilhelm called: "The
> Intimate Relationships of Inks and Papers: You Can't Talk About the
> Permanence of One Without Considering the Other" which you can read
> here:
> 
> http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/emg/WilhelmPhotoPlus10_29_99.pdf
> 
> You might find it interesting.

Yes, I've read that.  That's why I made the point of saying that 
I've printed on every oddball material you can think of.    And in 
my experience nonstandard materials such as brown paper bags and 
artist's paper are no more OR less stable than official inkjet 
paper.   I've had rapid fading and no fading, and rapid color shifts 
and no color shifts on both.    Also, BTW, I use three different 
printers - an HP 970, an Epson 870, and an Epson 2200 (which is my 
main printer, but it sucks on glossy so I use one of the others for 
that).

The problem is that whether it's Wilhelm's research or our own 
random BS'ing here in this forum, we can only do true accelerated 
aging research if we deeply understand the chemistry of the inks and 
coatings.   And NOBODY except the manufacturer knows that because 
it's proprietary.   Without that knowledge we can't intelligently 
anticipate what factors might even matter in the paper: humidity, 
pH, lignin content, CaCO3 residue, glucuronoxylans content, zeta 
potential?  ET CETERA.

And that's just the PAPER - all of us are clueless about the inks, 
too.   Look at the discussion we just had about whether the size of 
the ink particles affects fading. 

You CANNOT do an accelerated aging test that's worth a damn unless 
you know what factors constitute an acceleration of the aging 
process, and that requires more understanding of the chemistry than 
anyone outside the company actually has. 

This is the biggest difference between BW photography and inkjet 
printing - i/j printing is black-box - we push buttons and make 
settings but the actual process is unknown and out of our control.  
In BW photography there is NO part of the process that's unknown or 
out of our control.   The physics and chemistry of BW film, 
developer and paper is all well-understood.  When I first started in 
photography (I'm 51) it was common for avid photographers to make 
their own developer, and some photographers still do.