Digital BW, The Print

Ben,

>...wondering if anyone ... wanted to comment on issues like 
>lightfastness, ...

I concluded several years ago that I had to do my own testing.  So, I made a
fluorescent light fader (cheap but probably about as good as any), and
started doing carefully-controlled comparison tests.  (I'll leave the
predictions of years of display to Wilhelm and RIT.)  That is what convinced
me to switch from Piezo to MIS inks.  The cheaper MIS inks were more
lightfast.

Now both companies have new and very lightfast pigments.  I still do some
testing, however, to see if anything better comes around and even to explore
non-inkset sources of pigments.  

The bottom line is that the MIS UltraTone family of pigments has beat every
other inkset I've tested, including the Epson Archival pigments.  The carbon
pigments seem to be the very best in terms of their retaining the visual
density after lots of light exposure.  The carbon does warm up a bit,
however.  I think the amount of warming is acceptable and not unlike what we
see with other traditional B&W media.

Last year the magenta (which is in the cool and neutral inks) was the
relative weakling.  So, at that time I recommended pure carbon, like the MIS
EZ-Warm, for the best lightfastness.  (For archival, dark storage the paper
base and storage conditions are the limiting factors, not the pigments.)
Now the latest formulations have substituted a new pigment for the magenta.
Because of this, the new UT neutral inks are almost as lightfast as the
carbon.

Of course, I may not be totally un-biased here.  MIS's business model is
such that it simply produces what the market wants.  It does not do its own
B&W inkset designs, but it is an expert in finding good inks that act as the
inputs for the B&W inksets.  As a practical matter, during the last few
years, the B&W inksets have been formulations that I've come up with.  So,
while I'm independent and do this for my own non-monetary purposes, one
could argue that I may have a bias toward the inksets I formulated.  On the
other hand, I formulated them in response to my fade tests, and my goal is
to get the medium to the point where it is accepted by collectors as equal
to the silver print.  Additionally, I've published on this forum the formula
for a UT7-clone based on Epson UC inks.  I also published the fade test
results, and the UC-based UT7 did great in their delta e, but not as well as
the MIS inks in density reduction (fading).

Hope this helps.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com