I know one thing, I don't believe a word of any "in house" testing figures. Over the last 15 years I've been burned many times buy such self-serving data. They would have to prove they are totally objective, and how are they going to do that. It sounds like more of a pr screw-up than anything.
Pretty much. And we've seen it cut both ways - some in-house figures significantly underestimated their performance, while others grossly overestimated it. Hopefully Aardenburg Imaging can get the funding it needs to perform some independent tests.
I would like to see these new inksets tested side-by-side on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm, with no laminate or other coating, possibly with a known quantity (e.g. Ultrachrome K3, Ultrachrome HDR or Lucia EX) as a control.
We already have a lot of information on the relative permanence of papers – those with good longevity tend to have better readings with every inkset than papers with poor longevity. For example, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl 320mg tends to have better longevity than Epson Hot Press Natural, and that holds true with every inkset. It’s not as if Paper A might outperform Paper B with Lucia EX, but Paper B outperforms Paper A with Ultrachrome K3 – where one paper outperforms another, it tends to outperform it regardless of which inkset is tested. So, we can already rank papers as to which ones have better permanence and choose our media based on that.
We can also rank inksets by permanence. As a general rule, HP Vivera > Lucia EX (although this is very close on many papers) > Ultrachrome HDR (although this gets a lot better with a RIP to minimise the use of yellow ink) > Ultrachrome K3. This ranking tends to hold true regardless of what paper the inks are tested on.
What we don’t know is where these new inksets fit into the hierarchy. Do the new Epson inksets outlast Lucia EX? Does Canon’s new Lucia Pro inkset outlast Vivera (showing that Canon’s new permanence claims are much more conservative than previous ones), or have they gone backwards?
So, we need to test all the new inksets on the same paper to get a relative ranking – preferably a well-established, well-known paper that has a lot of data from other inksets so that we can make a good comparison. Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm fits the bill perfectly – it’s one of the most commonly-used high-end papers, there is a lot of data available for it (practically every pigment inkset tested on Aardenburg has been tested on it) and it’s a consistent product which has been around for a long time (so there shouldn’t be too much variation between batches or changes to the formula). With a set of data from the new inksets on it, we would be able to see where the new inks fit into the longevity hierarchy and choose an inkset based on that, no matter what medium we decide to print on. (i.e. if Canon Lucia Pro outperforms Lucia EX on Photo Rag 308, it should also outperform Lucia EX on every other paper).