In his IPIC 2016 – Fearless Reinvention session in Las Vegas this week (July 12) Ron Kubara, Noritsu’s director, Worldwide Strategic Sales and Planning, and company spokesperson, gave an unequivocal endorsement for dry inkjet printing over silver halide (AgX), effectively laying down the gauntlet to photo labs which hadn’t done so already to switch.
Ron Kubara, Noritsu
He said that the high colour gamut and resolution of smartphones, tablets and even the latest TV monitors, were leaving people increasingly unimpressed with photographic prints from AgX printers.
‘Why aren’t people printing from their phones? Maybe it’s because the picture looks better on the phone,’ he asserted, later adding that there would be more demand for photographic prints if they were more vibrant, and closer to the impact of images viewed on a phone.
He said that Samsung’s latest phones had a colour gamut greater than sRGB, and a resolution of 577 pixels per inch.
The ‘young human eye’ couldn’t distinguish one dot from another when resolution is great than 267 dpi, so that dpi is really irrelevant because everyone is at 300dpi or better. However, poor paper stock will cause feathering on inkjet prints which will effect perceived resolution.
Silver halide is no longer the standard, he said.
‘Are you simply doing silver halide printing because they are cheaper?’ he asked, predicting that in the near future that would no longer be the case.
‘Fuji and Kodak are putting up prices 10 per cent every year. Dry is going down every year,’ he said. I’m willing to take a bet you will be paying more for silver halide prints than inkjet in five years from now.’
He said lab owners needed to take this into consideration when making decisions today.
Independent Photo Supplies managing director Stuart Holmes, who was attending the session, conceded that silver halide paper prices were indeed being forced up, but questioned whether inkjet costs were actually falling. (IPS distributes Kodak paper and a range of both wet and dry printers.) Mr Kubara responded by hinting at some looming developments from Noritsu in commercial inkjet printing.
Wider gamut
Mr Kubara said that while in the blue part of the spectrum, silver halide and inkjet delivered similar results, inkjet was superior in reds, magentas and greens, passing around a series of prints which seemed to clearly prove his point.
‘You are seeing prints that have never been done before because silver halide couldn’t do it,’ he said, adding that inkjet whites were whiter, and blacks were blacker than silver halide prints.
He said the popularity of Chromaluxe showed that customers will respond to vibrant photographic printing, and said that Kodak metallic and Fujifilm pearlescent paper was closer to what they were seeing on their phones.
‘Pearlescent pops!’ he said.
Academy School Photography in Adelaide earlier this year ditched its silver halide equipment and installed 13 Epson Surelab D3000s.
Moving onto longevity, he said that once again, silver halide had fallen behind, with a life of 20 to 40 years depending on the brand and type of paper. Pigment ink prints (as produced on wide format printers) will last longest, while the latest best commercial drylabs such as the Epson Surelabs, the Fujifilm DL650 and the Noritsu Green series will last longer than silver halide prints. Archival keeping specialist Henry Wilhelm (The Wilhelm Institute) had conducted accelerated ageing tests on the Epson and Fujifilm systems which proved this.
‘Dry [inkjet] has better permanence than any silver halide paper,’ he said.
He qualified this by noting that dye-based consumer injket prints generally had poor keeping qualities. ‘The ozone kills them,’ he said.
He also explained why wide format printers run eight or 10 or even 12 inks while commercial drylabs produce impressive photographs getting by with four or six.
‘Pigment inks don’t blend together – that’s why there are more inks. Dye inks create new colours when they overlap.’
He said that inkjet drylabs could simulate the look of silver halide printing if and when required by lab owners or their customers, but that was in effect ‘dumbing down’ inkjet printing technology.
He just wants to sell more printers!!
David, correct of course he does and I was of your mind until recently.
Pleased we went dry and down the Epson D3000 path. We thought we were as good as anyone with Ag but increasingly with wet we couldn’t get the colours customers were wanting from digital files, that is no longer an issue.
Add in very little power consumption and almost no service requirements it makes sense.
PG,What do you about film (35mm) scanning?
David we still have our good old Dlab2 without the processing end. Just scan to a hot folder and print from that inc an index print. I am reliably informed that the Epson has the better interphase than the other two.
Second what PG says. We went to a dry Noritsu and never looked back.
As mentioned whites are white , blacks black and our customers have commented that the prints look more like what they think they should than our old wet lab did. Not too mention slight colour changes from different paper stock with our old lab and having to keep the Chem fresh in the wet lab and it’s been win win. Also a win was our power bill just about halving.
Our Noritsu just does what it’s meant to do and does it well. We walk in , switch it on and that’s that. Maintenance as mentioned is also so far minimal. And the fact it can do more and print larger than our old wet so we have added value to what services we can provide.
To finish up , we were staring to loose some fussy customers due to the increasing inconsistency in our wet , but have won them back and them some with the quality our dry puts out.
Cheers.
We have the Epson D3000 in for testing for a couple of months now, and it is good, but I challenge the idea of it being that much ‘better’ in the image quality than Ag. It has it’s strengths and weaknesses. It is just different. It’s another choice.
There is no need to bad-mouth other technologies (choices), like the tone of this implies. Such a headline, is just that, a headline. Obviously these machines are easier to make and support, and Noritsu need to push their new business model.
We well remember wide format when in 2000 we deciding that finally it come close to Ag, for photos that was. The difference between the four colour aqueous and the latest latex is chalk and cheese. I don’t think it will take too long for small format inkjet to get there, especially as the price of paper and chemicals keep increasing.
Noritsu continues to manufacture traditional AgX printers along with an Inkjet (IJ) lineup. My 60-min. presentation focused on purchasing the right printer technology for the market perusing over the life expectancy of the printer. and if it is a consumer print market, consider the fact that the majority of images are being viewed on high color gamut and saturation smart devices, HDTV’s, monitors and laptops prior to printing. In regards to consumers & increasing market demands for printing, I posed the question if prints more closely matched what consumer see on their high color gamut/saturation display, would they make more prints? While a new question, think about Kodak Kodachrome and Fuji Velvia films and Ilford Cibachrome prints; why were they in demand in their day? While noting that IJ prints more closely match colorful images viewed on these devices, I also stated that AgX users should consider using wide gamut papers from Kodak and Fuji such as Fuji’s Super Type CN for deeper blacks and wider color gamut, I even showed a slide of Fuji’s brochure highlighting the feature of wider color gamut).
I also stated that to the best of my knowledge Wilhelm research has not published archival information on Fuji/Noritsu dye ink prints and has published archival information on dye inks indicating the results are greater than traditional AgX prints. Mr. Wilhelm also informed me that dye inks are susceptible to ozone and that I added Noritsu dye inks have additional protection against ozone as compared to consumer printer inks.
I am amazed that both Epson and Kodak don’t get the Wilhelm tests. Has Noritsu had the tests done, if not why not. We were interested in the Noritsu, especially for photobooks but were told that we could only use Noritsu paper which was limiting.