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Author Topic: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?  (Read 6775 times)

hdomke

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Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« on: April 14, 2013, 06:12:49 pm »

Could Epson's new solvent printer, the S70670 be considered a true Fine Art printer?
Does it have the color gamut and fade resistance? 

The 64-inch 11880 has not been upgraded in over 6-years. Instead, Epson comes out with this 64-inch solvent printer.
Could the S70670 replace the 11880 for fine art printing on canvas?

If anyone has experience with that I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks!
Henry
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Wayne Fox

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bill t.

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Re: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« Reply #2 on: April 15, 2013, 02:05:12 am »

If we had an S70670 profile for a known media, we could compare it to an equivalent aqueous media profile using iccview.de or Colorthink, or such.  Would be interesting.  Type 2 profiles would be required for iccview.de.  Of course there would be a certain amount of apples<>oranges involved with such a comparison, and profiles don't say everything about print aesthetics.  But it's a place to start.  Couldn't find any profiles posted on the Epson sites.
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iladi

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Re: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« Reply #3 on: April 15, 2013, 05:54:47 am »

you can also try to find an answer in a sign dedicated forum such as sign101.com
there are some people who work with this printer and able to help.
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Scott Martin

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Re: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« Reply #4 on: April 15, 2013, 11:14:48 am »

Could Epson's new solvent printer, the S70670 be considered a true Fine Art printer?
Does it have the color gamut and fade resistance? 

Absolutely. We used to laugh at the early inkjet printers in the 1990s but the technology improved to an incredible extent. In a similar fashion the quality and price of both Eco-Solvent and UV Curable printers is improving today and we'll see more and more work done on these machines in the coming years.

The 64-inch 11880 has not been upgraded in over 6-years. Instead, Epson comes out with this 64-inch solvent printer. Could the S70670 replace the 11880 for fine art printing on canvas? If anyone has experience with that I'd love to hear about it.

Right, they know the market and high volume canvas printing shops want eco-solvent printers for their speed, durability and the ability to exhibit without varnishing. All the high volume shops are keeping an eye on these new printers very closely. One of my clients is a beta site for Epson and we're loving what we're seeing from them so far.

The Epson GS6000 was Epson's first attempt at an Eco-solvent printer but it was a bit of a disaster on several levels. Nonetheless, lots of shops still use lots of GS6000 printers because of their advantages over aqueous printers. We're all hoping that the new SureColor printers solve the challenges we saw with the GS6000.

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pixeldoppelganger

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Re: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« Reply #5 on: April 20, 2013, 01:21:41 pm »

It's hard to quantify 3 - 5 years in outdoor conditions, into a gallery indoor setting. My clients need more concrete data, and sadly there is no public accelerated lightfast testing on any of the Epson solvent or other commercial solvent based inks.  RIT has done some in-house testing, but this data is not available to the public. Aardenburg Imaging has no solvent data last time I checked....

I suppose if your clients are ok with this unknown, then go ahead and use it for canvas reproductions.  For upper gallery and museum level sales/collections, which don't really deal in 'giclee reproductions' steer clear away from solvent inkjet, until we can get Henry Wilhelm or some other institution to provide data.

That being said, I want an archival one   :)
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enduser

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Re: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« Reply #6 on: April 20, 2013, 07:34:44 pm »

Solvent printers (eco or not) print on almost anything, as well as canvas.
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MHMG

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Re: Can Solvent Printers be Fine Art Printers?
« Reply #7 on: April 20, 2013, 07:58:10 pm »

Aardenburg Imaging has no solvent data last time I checked....

...That being said, I want an archival one   :)

The AaI&A Printmakers' testing fund pretty much got wiped out on the last round of samples I put into test, so I'm waiting on more donations before I can take in more sample submissions from AaI&A members, but I will be more than happy to test output from this new line of Epson Solvent printers once the funding is there and a member wants to submits some samples for test.  The fact that the ink is formulated with a solvent other than water is irrelevant to the Aardenburg testing methodology, so the test results will be directly comparable to any other samples in the AaI&A database except for the white and metallic inks which will require a modified test target. Those unique colorants will require a non standard test target to incorporate those colors, but other than that the I* color and tonal accuracy metric I use can test any color set you want to throw at it.

In lieu of any independent testing, however, reading the "longevity" claims from Epson's own published literature on this new Surecolor solvent printer technology strongly suggests that the final image permanence will be highly dependent on image content.,  i.e., Epson claims the CMYK colorants pass an outdoor durability rating at 3 years, adding the orange ink drops it to two, adding the white pigment drops it to one, and adding the metallic ink comes in at a very surprising limiting factor of only 3 weeks! Yikes! It would be very interesting to determine how it will hold up for indoor display environments! My guess is that artists will be very interested in harnessing the white and metallic pigments for their own creative output, so this tecnology is indeed likely to show up in galleries and in museum collections in the very near future :)

cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
« Last Edit: April 20, 2013, 08:11:27 pm by MHMG »
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