> Is that true, that digital prints made using those type of printers can now > outlast regular prints made at a photo lab?
Pretty much. There are a number of variables and unknowns: 1. Digital print LE (life expectancy) is a function of the ink/paper combination, not just one or the other. 2. Print degradation must be defined: usually it is a certain percentage of color fade in the weakest dye or pigment. 3. Accelerated aging tests can't test for effects that are not known or accepted. 4. Different labs' and companies' standard for LE shouldn't be cross-compared. That is, if a company says ink-paper combination A lasts "25 years" and Wilhelm Research says combination B lasts 30 years, you haven't really learned that B lasts longer than A. All this got started because Kodak seems to have made a unilateral Corporate decision in the late '40s that good LE was too expensive and until the 1980s turned away from processes that had good LE and followed a course of producing cheaper color materials that had poor LE. Ektacolor prints from the 1970s have perhaps the worst LE of any widely used photographic materials. The reason Henry Wilhelm hates Kodak so much is that it is rather cynical to BOTH ignore print LE in AND run comprehensive advertising campaigns to the effect that photographs preserve memories! (We can easily forget, today, how much advertising presence Kodak had back then.) There's more to the story, but believe me I watch what I say in public when it comes to some of the uglier legal incidents of those days. I've editorialized in the past that I think we were damned lucky that early digital inkjet prints had such execrably poor LE. What it did was to bring LE to the forefront as a consumer issue. Now the manufacturers can't sweep it under the rug as they did with conventional color materials--it's become well accepted as a technical feature to be considered when purchasing a printer. This is very lucky for us. It forces the manufacturers to address the issue in their R&D. If early digital inkjet prints had had a print LE of, say, ten years, the issue might never even have come up. --Mike
