Papers to minimise fade with aftermarket dye inks.

[peter D]

After a considerable delay I placed the order for the two 30 X 0.610 metres rolls of Baoding Giant Image RC Swellable paper. The freight forwarder chosen was the New Zealand based one mentioned in the previous post. Cost was US$107 for the 12 kgm package (estimated by the paper vendor) to be transported on a door to door basis by DHL.
Unfortunately this was an uninsured price and an additional US$31.50 was needed to insure for damage to the goods including the cost of the freight.
The probability of damage to the shipment is pretty low and the insurance adds 21% to the total cost but I figure that to the inexperienced importer it is still worth considering.

The price of the paper is excellent as an FOB price was quoted plus a small fee for the use of the PayPal payment system.
A Chinese based Logistics company did quote US$100 for shipping using TNT couriers but did not accept PayPal and although advertising their service on Alibaba did not accept payments through them. Insurance was not priced in the initial quote.

So far all Logistics companies that have quoted on this shipment have used the courier door to door option, the volume being too low for sea freight and a small shipment from China is regarded as high risk and seemingly justifying an inflated price structure particularly directly from the courier company itself.

All up including the insurance the paper cost to me is about US$4.90 per square metre which is still quite reasonable compared with what I have payed for an equivalent surface area of boxed HP Swellable paper in New Zealand cut into in A4 size sheets (about US$15.00/sq mtre).
The HP swellable (Premium Plus) has virtually disappeared from retailers shelves in NZ.

I'll post an update on the shipment as it happens.

As regards the fade test, from my perspective the results are so compelling that I will be selling all my Canon microporous paper and printing almost exclusively on the swellable paper.
The print included in the test made on Canon semigloss microporous paper that had been over sprayed with a lacquer type fixative spray wasn't found after going missing on the 21st December but the fading apparent with that print up until it went AWOL was about the same as the unprotected one on the same paper alongside it.

I'll post the results of the fade test when there is a little more fading apparent that can be attributed solely to light as at present it is not that obvious and I will be reliant on photographs or flatbed scans of the prints to show what has happened.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Won't you have to pay some taxes at the time of import on top of that ?

 

[peter D]

Yes one would here in new Zealand if the total price of the goods plus freight plus insurance exceeds a NZ$ figure that would attract goods and tax to the value of NZ$60.
The GST rate here is currently 15% so a total figure of NZ$400 (approximately US$280) is the total imported cost of goods threshold that is used to determine whether GST is due or not. Over that figure other onerous customs clearance charges kick in on top of the GST.
I'm keen to complete the transaction ASAP as the recently elected government here is intent on lowering the threshold figure.

There are no import duty (tarrif) charges on most paper goods including printing papers entering NZ and no other border inspection charges that I can determine. The logistics company concurs that the freight and insurance charge should be the only extras.
You'd have to check what your situation is as regards GST, VAT etc but it is likely there will be better freight deals to Europe and the USA. I'll post my findings on the robustness of the export packaging used by Baoding Giant Image once the shipment arrives so that folks can make their own call on insurance with more certainty.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Please let me give you an update on the (non) -fading of the swellable papers - prints on those papers - now after 12 weeks - still don't fade , not at all yet, and this with poor performing dye inks - a mix of L300 and other inks . The black ink on a tpyical glossy paper (Aldi Netbit) has turned brown since a while already. I now reduced the number of patches to continue this test - to one sheet of the glossy swellable paper - the other swellable papers seem to perform equally, and one sheet - standard glossy Netbit.
And I can report another observation - a gloss optimizer overprint over these dye inks yields the same result so far - no observable color/lightness shifts after these 12 weeks. I started a separate small test for this effect. As discussed earlier and emphasized by @mikling this setup mainly tests the protection effects against gaseous agents - ozone to the most extend, this test does not cover at all protection against sun/strong visible light and UV radiation

 

[peter D]

Ink Stained Fingers results are being pretty much duplicated by my own fade test setup with the added observation that the only fade discernible with prints made on the swellable paper (Baoding Giant Image paper) is largely in the blacks and due mostly to exposure to light as evidenced by a print that is exposed to the atmosphere but shielded from light. This print is virtually identical in appearance to the control print which is shielded from both.
The print made on HP Swellable paper seems to have faded a little more that the Giant Image prints but a new print of the same image on this paper will need to be made to make a fair comparison.
The only print that has noticeably faded (especially in the blacks) is the print made on Canon Semigloss -a standard good quality microporous paper.
Interestingly so far the Giant Image swellable is not showing any yellowing in the unprinted areas exposed to light which hopefully indicates that the optical brightners used are reasonably stable.
As indicated at the start of the test (the derby) I've not exposed the prints to intense sunlight but rather treated them as being hung as an indoor display which gets some additional sunlight exposure from low angle sunlight coming through a window in the evening.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I had a look to the optical brighteners in the papers currently under test with a UV flashlight, like this one
https://www.amazon.com/Handheld-Sup...qid=1516089219&sr=8-14&keywords=uv+flashlight or any similar model, the cheapest one would do.
Some of the OBA's are gone during this test, by about the same level in the swellable papers and regular microporous papers, and not by very much yet. Other tests last year had shown that OBA's fade away even quicker than cheap inks under sun exposure which seems to make a big difference for the OBA's

 

[peter D]

Yes I had read your reference to optical brightners in a much earlier posting. I must confess I only know that they inevitably loose their whiteness over time due to UV exposure and that Canon use an aluminium based brightner in their Pro Platinum gloss paper which I've used fairly often for B&W prints.
Shouldn't one expect to see a drift towards an off white colour with longer exposure to UV ?
I'm viewing a glass protected pair of prints where one has a light blocking cover and the two of them look much the same for whiteness of the unprinted areas - the light I'm using to compare them under is from a 4700K Solux MR16 (Halogen) True daylight type bulb.
On AliExpress they have an 800 lumen version your UV torch for US$2.85 free freight to NZ so I'll probably buy and try.

On a related topic the freight of the two paper rolls from Baoding China has only just gotten underway with DHL more than a week after the package was ready to uplift. The lack of action has been explained as a misunderstanding between the logistics company's agent in China and the paper sales department but I suspect someone in the logistics company had seriously underestimated the freight and that their agent in China wouldn't play ball until subsidized by the NZ end of the operation.
Anyway along the way I've found another reliable logistics firm that will consolidate packages with other goods into a shipping container should I wish to import more at lower rates and be prepared to wait a few weeks.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Such a UV flashlight is a simple, affordable and practical tool to evaluate OBA's in papers and gives you a much better view of nozzle checks - specifically of the yellow lines. But you only whould need the 800 lumen version if you want to fry your test sheets or illuminate half the room - CSI style ... but rather get a simple one.
I cannot confirm that papers directly shift to yellow when the OBA's are gone , I didn't see a difference under typical indoor room light between fresh sheets out of the box and 2 weeks of sunshine exposure last year. I think the yellowing is an effect taking place much slower, over years. But that's something I'm not going to test...

Freight - these complications just may explain why Baoding is not much interested in int'l business....

 

[peter D]

Freight: Could be freight complications but I'm interpreting the problem as one of scale. They deal in quite large volume for wide format commercial machines and the two 30 metre rolls they are sending to me are just samples for them and they expect the importer just to write off the freight as an expense related to a much bigger order if the paper is satisfactory.
They have a 40 % discount deal with DHL China but that still results in a very high freight figure for small quantities because its a door to door courier service.

LED torch: Aliexpress have 9 led 3 watt 180 lumen UV torches for US$1.85 delivered to NZ. I did buy a cheap mini torch once but it was so badly configured electrically I had to rejig the on/off switch to make it work.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

...whatever lamp works for you - my 4$ lamp is still o.k. - I use it regularly, and I have a backup in case the switch breaks ..