Ron
I can only hope you are right about the new materials, but for the record we never have sold shows of colour c print or inkjet work with that type of life expectations to our clients since the mid 90's.
Currently Wilhelm is giving c print a very poor rating, my understanding he is giving inkjet a better rating, and pure pigments are still the king, whether they are tri colour carbon or gum, where there are now many workers producing images.
I personally know about three major colour portrait / wedding photographers who's whole careers are in question, due to colour image fading, these three are in litigation with carriage trade customers. I am not calling you up on the carpet on this, you have your rightful opinion, and I have mine. Your background is well documented here and I respect your knowledge but I have to take a completely different stance here.
The Archives of Canada were asking one of these photographers to provide a historical background of their work and would not accept his colour prints, I was asked to make silver gelatin fibre prints by black white conversion, this would have been a wonderful assignment, unfortunately not only were most of the prints faded and not acceptable by the archive, the colour negative were also damaged to a point that I could not rescue them , I grudgingly turned away a very lovely assignment. I believe one of my competition did inkjet black and white prints for him.
I do not think I am the only one that can point out this problem, and to say the new material is light years ahead of the old material, is news to me and my counterparts in the colour print industry in Canada and internationally.
I got into the lab business over this very issue, I started out in a portrait/wedding business and could have taken over the shop, I refused due to all the colour prints coming back as cyan replicas so this issue is dear to me and I hopefully with silver gelatin prints and alt prints can leave behind some legacy of my little time on earth, I really doubt they will be current RA4 prints, I wish it was so. My first lab was a Black and White lab only, then we brought in Cibachrome, then we purchased a Lambda with the inkling of being able at some day to make digital separation negatives and make pure pigment prints. That day is here now and all R&D is in this area for us.
Bob
Bob;
And over those 35 years color papers were improved dramatically so a 35 year old print will not be the same in image stability as a present day CA or Endura print. Both of these products are less than 35 years old, in fact they are less than 15 years old. In between, in the Kodak line up was the Supra I, II and III which were not up to the image stability of the current Endura, and CA underwent a major change in about 2006.
I know Henry Wilhelm too, and I met him in Washington at his first talk to the SPSE. His data was both right and wrong at that time because the actual data depends on test condition. I last spent about 4 hours with him in 2006 when we talked about - gee, dye stability, and we toured the RIT Image Permanence Institute. Then I left to take the ICIS short course on image stability.
At the present time, Endura stored and displayed in a museum at about 100 fc - 150 fc will, according to reports last for up to 200 years. This can only be estimated by accelerated tests though. We will know when we get there, right?
PE
