Papers to minimise fade with aftermarket dye inks.

[Ink stained Fingers]

Let me updatge you on the fading of the Chinese swellable papers - they perform pretty good - more than that - very good

That's how it looks just after 2 weeks, outside, pretty humid, not much sun and something like 10 deg C, performance might be different during summer, with more sun, the ratio between UV radiation on ozone will be different, but that's a test I only can do next year.
It's all on glossy papers - the same ink - the left is the reference Chinese patch kept in the dark, the middle one the exposed Chinese glossy swellable paper and the right patch is printed onto the Aldi/Netbit glossy RC/PE paper, the upper half is covered with a GO overprint, the bottom sections are without further protection as it came out of the printer - the black ink is turning into a milk chocolade brown at this time.
I'm collecting some numbers of the luminance changes during this test, I may publish some later when fading becomes visible as well on the swellable papers - probably in x weeks from now....
This test very much confirms @mikling 's original assumption about swellable papers he started this thread with - swellable papers provide a very good fading protection to dye inks.
No other issues of such papers - availablity, pricing, handling, profiling etc and how it might compare to other (not readily) available swellable papers by Ilford , HP or Epson are discussed in any detail. As I mentioned before - there are other specialty papers on the market today which are not easier to handle than this one

 

[mikling]

Well, it was more than assumption really. I first got into these papers over ten years ago when I purchased some inexpensive HP Glossy Photo Papers from the flea market. They were returns from Staples being sold off and for a couple dollars I had 25 sheets of 13x19. Then my i9900 would have trouble with it occasionally and my R200 caused lots of puddling. The drying aspect had me research what this was all about then I knew what this stuff was all about. The handling etc. caused the papers to sit on the side. Then came the Pro9000. A bit better and then the Pro-100 which showed it handled it well. The Ilford paper I also found on clearance a little after I picked up the first swellables and I tried it because a customer had raved about the texture and it was so cheap, I wanted to see what it was about. He was right about the pearl finish and portraits. The Ilford was better behaved than the HP based on what I saw. It dried faster and puddled less.
I have mentioned these papers in the past years but hardly anyone picked up on this at the time. Grandad 35 as it turns out had been using these same papers for special prints for long term display as well. The other side of this is that they performed very well with a special Gray ink set that HP used to sell.
I did some informal tests on this paper against pigment but the pigment seemed to win but that was years ago.
Again anyone who is refilling and experiences rapid fade should realize that it is not likely light but ozone that is causing it. The only solution in that situation is to seek out these papers or switch to a pigment ink printer. The rapid fade also tells you about the environment you live in as well. Will it eventually affect your health as well? Maybe there is something about these antioxidants. Hmmmmmm..... I don't know but I wonder.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

There are a few more effects becoming visible now which I can report to you,

- the Fujifilm DL ink on the Netbit PE/RC paper does not show any luminance changes yet,
with or without a GO overprint

- the arbitrary dye mix, the black specifically is shifting to brown as shown above, this
on a Netbit paper, it would change even faster on a castcoated budget paper, the GO
overprint very much still keeps this change under control, the GO overprint seems
to provide a similar protection against ozone as the swellable paper. I could assume that the
surface is not as smooth as on the swellable paper since it is printed dot by dot which
spread and fuse - or not completely, so it may not be as effective at the end, but the effect
is visible above.

- The luminance of all color patches on the swellable papers dropped slightly so far, it may be
an humidity effect, but I left the sheets drying for some hours before I scanned them. This
would make profiling difficult, you wouldn't know when the inks are dry and stable.

 

[martin0reg]

First let me thank you for this profound examination, ISF
If the ink is a mix of canon BCI and epson L300 I assume you are printing with epson piezo printers, right? For these printers we have the well known and tested fujifilm DL as a possible solution to minimize fading with refill ink... but not for canon thermal heads.
After many trials and errors with 3rd party inks for canon, I'm using now canon ink out of bigger BCI1411 to refill my pixma's. So what about the fading of BCI-1411 ONLY vs. one other 3rd party canon compatible - on decent quick dry paper (like sihl or netbit) vs. swellable?
Do you have any experience or ideas? Also regarding the question how big the two "factors" for fading are, ink vs. paper?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I tested the BCI1411 inks quite a while ago , yes in an Epson printer - WF2010W with refill cartridges, that's a much easier handling to swap inks than with any tank system printer - L300 or L800 I'm running otherwise. The black BCI1411 didn't perform very well - about as bad as the L300 black, the CMY colors came out somewhat better than other noname dye inks I'm using. I'm using the L300/BCI1411 black for daily internet prints, not for pictures, and since they fade pretty quick they deliver fast results. I'm running as well the DL inks in this test to compare, but that's an ink Canon users can't use. All prints are done with the WF2010W, same driver settings, on different papers - swellable glossy , -pearl, -satin, Netbit with the dye mix inks and the DL inks on Netbit. The prime target of this test is to confirm the assumption that the swellable papers increase the fading performance of non genuine/not so good dye inks significantly which they do. So it's the inks, the paper coating and the environment ozone vs. UV.

 

[mikling]

If it hasn't been obvious, one needs to recognize that ISF is using the worse possible scenario in his testing. The weak blacks....so this test is demonstrative of a kind of worst case scenario. That these bad inks does indeed perform much much better is most likely indicative that other colors will also at least perform as well or more likely better. So in most situations, we would expect very improved performance with inks that performed better than the bad blacks that was shown to be weak on normal papers. Of course only testing will prove this out as sometimes logic has a hole. It is possible that the blacks were weak in Ozone attack but superior from UV fade once protected from ozone. Now wouldn't that be interesting? I would not be surprised actually.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

If it hasn't been obvious, one needs to recognize that ISF is using the worse possible scenario in his testing. The weak blacks....so this test is demonstrative of a kind of worst case scenario.

Yes, I think I should use this text as a disclaimer every time I post some results of this test.
I tested the L300 inks quite some time ago, and as well the BCI1411 black, they turned out to fade very quick under the sun, within days. So I chose them in a mix to get results rather quick for this test, if I would have started with Fujifilm DL inks on these swellable papers first changes may become visible in months - at Christmas ?? - and not within a week or two. Other inks most likely will perform better. And I think I can give you some info how the other CMY colors are doing. I mentioned already that their luminance dropped slightly so far, and I try to find a simple way to see how and whether the color saturation changed with it. I wouldn't like to go through spreadsheets with RGB and Lab values to do that.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

the swellable papers are still showing very good fading stability now after 3 weeks - there is actually not so much to report - no changes , I'll scan the patches again in 2 weeks.

This scan shows how the same inkset is doing on the standard Aldi/Netbit paper, the black is gone to brown and getting lighter, the upper part of the patches are covered with a gloss opt. overprint, the most right black bar is the same black ink on a swellable glossy paper - no changes yet. It shows that the GO overprint provides a similar protection level as
the swellable paper so far at this time, in this humid, low UV environment outside, all inks now got visibly lighter w/o GO.
It may look different under more intense sun/UV exposure - good for a test in 6 months from now...

 

[peter D]

Today a comprehensive fade test of the Giant Image swellable paper was commenced.
These were all printed using after market inks supplied by Precision Colors and printed on a Canon Pro100.
All the samples are mounted on mat card and are separated from the card with a sheet of acid free paper behind them.
From the image of the test setup you will see that here are 4 sample prints printed on Giant Image swellable Gloss and one on their swellable satin paper. Of the Giant Image gloss papers there is one behind glass and shielded from light which is labeled "control" and another above it behind glass but exposed to light. The other two prints on Giant Image Gloss are exposed to the atmosphere with one shielded from light.
All remaining prints are on different papers (including one Giant Image Satin Swellable) as labeled and they are all exposed to both the atmosphere (labeled "ozone") and light.

The cards of samples will be exposed to average conditions for wall mounted photos inside a dwelling with some exposure to sunlight through window glass for part of the day.
I'll run the test until the results become obvious and post them here.
My thanks to Ink Stained Fingers for supplying the samples of Giant Image Swellable paper that he posted to me all the way from Germany.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

that's a great and comprehensive test setup indeed - expanding the scope and separating the influcence of ozone and UV, I'm very interested in the results . It's getting a truely worldwide effort now - China, New Zealand, Germany , Canada