Print Your Portfolio – Part 1: Choosing a Printer

The photo industry is fond of telling us the best way to preserve your digital photos is to print them. That’s true – to a point. Making prints not only allows you to turn your digital images into a tangible asset; it also provides you with a great way to display them. There are few things more impressive than a well-made A3+ print on a paper that accentuates its best features. But every step you take in the production process requires careful consideration because it can affect the quality and longevity of the pictures you print.

In this article we look at printers.

Serious photographers will probably own – or be considering – an A3+ inkjet printer because it allows them to print enlarged versions of their best images in addition to making smaller prints for everyday use. If you’re in the market for a new printer, the following factors should be considered:

1. How many inks? Although some recent four-ink printers can produce excellent photo prints at a consumer level, they are not really suitable for printing a portfolio of your work because they cannot reproduce all the tonal and colour nuances of a printer with a larger ink set. At least six inks are required, especially if your prints will be larger than A4 size or if you will be binding them into a photo book, where they will receive close inspection. The basic ink set should contain a yellow cartridge plus full-strength and light cartridges in cyan, magenta and black inks. The addition of green, red and blue inks can increase the range of hues and depth of colour saturation in these colours but, as the usage of these inks is generally low, they are not really necessary.
For black and white printing, the best way to obtain truly neutral monochrome prints is to have three levels of black, with mid-grey and light-grey inks. These greatly extend the tonal subtlety of the printer and eliminate the tendency of earlier printers to produce B&W prints with slight colour casts. A dedicated monochrome mode should be available in the printer driver to make the most of these additional inks.

The take-home message is that the more cartridges the printer uses, the greater the tonal subtlety and the more accurate the colours and monochrome tones it can produce.

HP’s B9180 printer uses HP Vivera pigment inks, which offer lightfastness ratings of more than 200 years on certain papers.

2. Dye or Pigment Ink? The next choice is between dye-based and pigment based inks because, once you select your printer, you are locked into the type of ink it has been designed for. The performance differences between dye and pigment inks are largely related to their different natures. Interestingly, with recent developments in ink technologies, these differences are becoming less apparent in the actual prints made with the inks. Nevertheless, some important selection criteria remain.

Dye-based inks consist of liquid chemicals dissolved in a fluid vehicle, whereas pigment inks contain small particles of insoluble colourants, which are suspended in a liquid carrier. By their nature, dye-based inks can be delivered to the paper through finer nozzles than pigment inks. It is common for dye printers to support droplet sizes down to one picolitre (one trillionth of a litre), whereas pigment printers typically deliver droplets between three and six picolitres in size. Printers that use dye inks can, therefore, achieve finer details than pigment printers – at least in theory.

The new Epson Stylus photo 1410 printer is an affordably-priced dye-ink printer that delivers excellent colour prints with a lightfastness rating of around 90 years on selected papers.

Dye ink printers are usually faster than pigment printers and the resulting prints tend to have slightly richer colours and deeper blacks than pigment inks, especially on glossy papers. They may also produce a slightly wider colour gamut, although this difference has almost disappeared in the latest printer/ink combinations.

Unfortunately, dye-based prints tend to change colour for some time after they have been printed. These short-term colour drifts are due to chemical changes that occur as the dyes mix with the upper layers of the paper and interact with oxygen and other chemicals in the air. It can take between 30 minutes and several days for the colours in some dye prints to stabilise.

In contrast, because pigment inks contain solid particles, prints produced with them show no colour changes as they dry. Pigment inks are also much more stable, both in the short term and over time. These factors make pigment inks convenient for photographers because they can see how a print will look immediately after it has been produced. Pigment ink prints also tend to be waterproof, and more resistant to atmospheric humidity than dye ink prints.

Canon’s Pixma Pro9000 is a professional-quality A3+ printer that uses ChromaLife100 dye inks. Canon claims a lightfastness of 100 years on certain Canon papers and under specified display conditions.

Dye inks are usually absorbed into the top layers of the paper. This makes the resulting prints less susceptible to scuffing than some pigment ink printing, where the pigments are deposited on the surface of the paper and may flake off if the print is incorrectly handled. (Some pigment inks use resins that bond with the top layers of a properly-matched paper, minimising the risk of abrasion.)

The choice is usually a compromise between colour quality and longevity. For extreme long life, pigments are the way to go, but they can’t quite match the colour vibrancy of dyes. For adequate life and outstanding colour, dyes are the best option, especially if you like printing on glossy paper. A summary of the plusses and minuses of each type of printer is presented below.

Silver Halide vs Inkjet
Until a couple of years ago, most fine-art photographers printed their images on traditional, silver halide-based (AgX) media. The technology was proven; it delivered excellent picture quality, and media were available that provided adequate stability for display work. These media were expensive (compared with regular photolab papers and chemistry) but their longevity added value to the print and made it a sellable artwork.

Today, inkjet media is replacing silver halide prints in both the fine art and consumer/enthusiast worlds. The best inkjet ink/paper systems can not only match the performance of the best traditional media; they can outstrip them. Whereas in the past photographers had to send their work out to photo labs with professional equipment when they wanted prints, with an inkjet printer they can produce their own prints more cost-effectively and they can achieve the results they want.

Wilhelm Imaging Research, the internationally-renowned independent testing organisation, lists Ilfochrome (which was known as Cibachrome until 1991) as the longest-lasting of the traditional printing media. It offers display lightfastness of around 16 years for prints framed
In contrast, HP’s Vivera pigment inks on several matte papers marketed by HP claim lightfastness ratings of more than 250 years for prints displayed behind UF-3 filtered glass and over 230 years behind regular glass.

Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 pigment inks can also provide lightfastness ratings of more than 100 years with some matte, semi-matte and lustre papers. Even Epson’s new Claria dye inks come close to 100-year lightfastness on both glossy and matte papers as do the dye-based HP Vivera inks on specific HP media. And, if you’re choosing media for a photo book, all these inks have lightfastness rating of 200 years or more for album storage. Best of all, prints made with them look more vibrant and dynamic than prints made with AgX media, regardless of whether they are in colour or monochrome.