Papers to minimise fade with aftermarket dye inks.

[Ink stained Fingers]

The arrival of my TNT shipment is scheduled for next Wednesday, and I'll need a day or two to do some first test prints to report some findings

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I received the TNT shipment with a generous amount of swellable paper sheets by BDgiantimage from China, it's indeed swellable papers


with barely any water/humidity resistance at all....

I got 3 sets - glossy papers - papers with a satin finish - and papers with a pearl finish, I placed them all on a scale - they are all between 215 and 225 gr/m2, the satin and pearl papers feel slightly stiffer than the glossy paper, and all of them contain some optical brighteners visible with a UV lamp.

I printed my standard 4 color patches and a profile patch sheet on all of them and let them dry for a while, they feel somewhat sticky even quite some time after print, you only should print such papers one by one and removing them from the output bin.
Here are some observations on those three paper types:

- the surface of the satin paper is finer than on the pearl paper, that looks pretty coarse to me, just a personal judgement

- the glossy paper has a good gloss but the surface is not as even as on the Sihl/Netbit or HP or Canon papers. That's easy to test with a laser pointer, you place the paper on a table about 1 -1.5 m away from a white wall and point a laser beam of a pointer onto the surface under an angle of 30-45 deg and just watch the size of the reflected diffusion circle on the wall, differences in the surface evennesss become directly visible, this trick even works on papers already printed on

- there is an effect all these swellable papers show - a pretty strong bronzing of the cyan patches, I only used dye inks - a mix of some L300 and Canon dye inks which fade faster than the Fujifilm DL inks .

The left field is a cyan field on the glossy paper, the middle cyan patch is printed onto the satin paper, both show a magenta tint at the bottom, the top of both fields are overprinted with a gloss optimizer removing that magenta cast. The red patch on the right shows the improvement of the color saturation with the GO overprint.
The effect of the GO is visible here as well

The blacks get a visibly better saturation.

I used the same driver settings to print on all three paper types, but the glossy paper seems to have a lower ink limit, drying takes longer and inks are running into each other in darker areas of the profile patch sheet.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I checked for the overall color saturation and the gamuts of these papers, the glossy paper shows some irritating shape of the gamut body

Similar irregularities are visible as well on the bottoms side of it, I assume the problems come from the bronzing effects of the paper in combination with the illumination of the i1 spectro, the light is mirrored under 45 deg onto the paper, and the sensor sits vertically over it. A paper with such effects is pretty difficult to be used for actual printouts.

The satin paper compares like this to the Netbit paper

The green line traces the gamut of the Satin paper, the red line the standard glossy Netbit/Aldi paper, the overall gamut volume of the Satin paper is about 15% smaller than the Netbit gamut volume.
All three papers show significant bronzing in the cyan range, all the profile patch sheets got a GO overprint now and are sitting there to dry for another profile run tomorrow.

So much of an overview of these papers, there is one property, the most important one starting this thread by @mikling - do these papers improve the fading performance of dye inks really significantly - this will take a while to test - the test patches will go onto the balcony pretty soon.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I did another check with the Fujifilm DL dye inks and printed some patches as well with this ink, the cyan shows as well a similar bronzing , a magenta tint as with my other dye ink, so I'm very sure that my dye inks are not contaminated with pigment ink left overs in the syringe, bottle whereever.

I'm using a i1iO robot arm to scan the profile patch prints, the i1Pro is seated in a craddle and the sensor opening is sliding in a thin teflon ring over the paper, there appeared to be some sticky friction on the glossy paper which may have caused the irregularities in the gamut shape. The normal operating mode is stripe reading, I switched over to patch reading - one patche after the other and very slow - and get this

The strange deformations remain, this is pretty unusual and I have not seen something like this before when creating profiles. This is the gamut of the glossy paper, with a GO overprint this time to reduce the bronzing effects.
A GO overprint removes all bronzing effects and the gamut volume increases by about 5%, not much, the gain is mainly in the darker areas with the satin and pearl papers.

The last test, checking for improvements of the fading performance of dye inks will take some more time.

 

[mikling]

One thing about swellable papers and it was hinted at by toolman Hoe....the ink loads. He mentioned puddling and if you had experience with these papers in the past, you'd know what to watch out for. They have low ink load limits. That is possibly why you are having bronzing. If you are using an Epson printer, I would not be surprised at all. If you were using a Pro-Epson model, then you could control the density of the ink deposited to possibly control the bronzing. That bronzing is indicative of too high an load on the paper and the ink is not drying/mixing well.
How sensitive are ink limits....even on Canon you need to watch it. For example, an i9900 overloads the paper because the dark areas are high amts of CMY as well as PC, PM. The Pro-9000 did a bit better but still occasionally overloaded it. Remember though those printers are labeled as "Pro" they are not really. They don't allow the user to control ink like a real Pro model. The Pro-100 is also a "fake" pro model BUT despite that it never overloaded the paper. Why? Those gray inks! They help use less ink on the paper for control of the dark tones less CMY and PCPM.
The paper I used was Ilford Galerie Classic as well as HP Premium Plus Glossy. The HP paper was fussier for some reason with the 9000.
I imagine Ilford possibly is the best solution....and works wonderfully on the Pro-100 based on my experience.

The Epson SP-1400 as well as the 4 color Epson with dye inks were not workable with even the Ilford paper. So if you were using these printers, those results are not unexpected at all. The Artisan 1430 would also be a poor match with swellable papers. I imagine those ecotanks and L series would also not be a good fit.

Be careful with drying times as well. The paper must return to its original uniformity before profiling. If there was fritction, the paper was not possibly dry enough. At certain times of the year, with the 9000, it took 2 days or more for the paper to dry properly. You need to understand why. The paper dries from the outside first. Any moisture trapped inside will take much longer to dry. If the coating is not done right, you get the sealing effect. Ilford was best at this aspect...again no surprise since Ilford made some great papers.

No doubt why these were discontinued because I am sure many many printers were unsuited to these papers. Also if the aftermarket inks are not dense enough, the printer would be forced to pop even more ink onto the paper thus exarcebating problems. Again, I found the Pro-100 sailed right through. Joe' s test on the HP was also on a Pro-100.

Let's see what happens next, but Epsons really need not visit these papers based on what I saw years ago.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

yes, these papers are more difficult to handle , I gave the printouts about a day of drying time, the glossy one seems to take the longest time. I printed some color ramps from full to zero density, the bronzing with the cyan inks remains visible over 70% of the ramp, it's not being fixable with some lower ink density. It may look different with other inks e.g. Canon inks and I leave that up to you to test.
There is no way with the typical (Epson) printer drivers to control the ink limit specifically for a special type or paper, the PrintFab software as a kind of mini/semi-RIP would allow that for almost any Epson desktop printer.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm running a fading test with these Chinese swellable papers, and a trend becomes visible after the first week.

The left bar is the reference print on the glossy swellable paper, kept in the dark,
the middle patch is the exposed one, the right patch uses the standard Sihl/Netbit paper to compare with. All prints are done with the same printer, the same driver settings and the same inks, in this case a mix of a Canon BCI1411 black and Epson L300 black, both inks are of the quick fade type and can deliver results within a short time. The top half of the prints are overprinted with a gloss optimizer in a 2nd print run, this will allow a judgement whether the swellable papers can do better than a GO overprint for fade protection. The bottom right section is already turning into dark brown, on the Netbit paper without further protection.
I have some more papers in the test and will report more details in a week when differences become more visible.

 

[mikling]

In discussing swellable papers with a customer, he was able to refer to an Ilford distributor locally and I have been able to locate a stash of Ilford Swellable Papers from the Canadian Distributor of Ilford Papers. They are not allowed to sell to the USA or outside of Canada due to their agreements with ilford I can legally purchase from them and then resell it to anyone interested in getting some.
I will provide more information about this in the future but whatever is gone will be gone.

https://store.amplis.com/collections/ilford-galerie

Paper is a difficult thing to ship without damage and I have to check out the requirements to shipping paper.

 

[mikling]

I'm running a fading test with these Chinese swellable papers, and a trend becomes visible after the first week.
View attachment 6245
The left bar is the reference print on the glossy swellable paper, kept in the dark,
the middle patch is the exposed one, the right patch uses the standard Sihl/Netbit paper to compare with. All prints are done with the same printer, the same driver settings and the same inks, in this case a mix of a Canon BCI1411 black and Epson L300 black, both inks are of the quick fade type and can deliver results within a short time. The top half of the prints are overprinted with a gloss optimizer in a 2nd print run, this will allow a judgement whether the swellable papers can do better than a GO overprint for fade protection. The bottom right section is already turning into dark brown, on the Netbit paper without further protection.
I have some more papers in the test and will report more details in a week when differences become more visible.

It is quite clear that this stuff does work WRT to fade. Now what we need to see is the effect between gas and light. Another run is required with some samples in gas tight containers...like sealed glass bottles.

 

[peter D]

I've been out of contact with this since the 20th Oct.
Wow, thank you Ink Stained Fingers for getting into the test work so promptly and in such depth.
Mikling is right in my experience with dye ink fading as I've found the exposure to the atmosphere a dominant factor. Sealing the print on Canon papers with fixative spray has helped and an overcoat of gloss lacquer is even more effective as is enclosure in a plastic ring binder sleeve.
I'm also interested in learning how you found the handling characteristics of the 220gsm (approx) swellable paper.