Quadtones/ Concorde rag

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I've been getting nice prints with MIS quadtones and Concorde Rag. Unscientific I cut a print in half and placed half in a south facing window and the other half in dark storage. 15 days later the window print lost its cream color completely. Concorde Rag is a cream colored off white paper. Now its a brilliant white backround and the warm tone is gone. I can't detect any fading but its a different color almost cold blue. I worry this paper is a big loser in archivability, but on the other hand 15 days in the sun would probably ruin any prints. Any comments? I'am more worried about the paper than the ink. Steve M....

-- Steven Meyers (sdmey4@aol.com), September 23, 1999

Answers

You might want to contact the people at www.inkjetmall.com. They are selling the Lysonic quadtones now, and have probably got some experience with them.

-- Marc Sitkin (mbs@digitalmomentum.com), September 24, 1999.

My test showed the same results. The prints that have been in dark storage are still stable.

-- Marc Sitkin (mbs@digitalmomentum.com), October 19, 1999.

I am experiencing image stability problems as well with this combination. My prints, not in direct sunlight, have turned reddish in less than 2 months. Archival? MIS has yet to answer my inquiry about it. A print on Lysonic Standard paper has done the same. This is a problem. Has anyone yet tried the Lysonic Quads? Not the low gamut inks, but the quads. I've asked about three times on the Epson list and no one has replied.

-- Tyler Boley (tboley@emeraldnet.net), September 23, 1999.

It turns out I was using the "old" ink, which has since been reformulated. MIS told me the new ink should help the problem and sent me some. Results are the same, on Concorde Rag and Lysonic Standard prints turned significantly warmer in under 10 days in a large room with lots of windows but no direct sunlight. Perhaps it's an ink/coating reaction and papers like Sommerset Velvet work fine, however I can't use those papers. I'm ready to try different ink, this stuff can't be considered archival on papers prepped for inkjet.

-- Tyler (tboley@emeraldnet.net), October 23, 1999.

It is interesting if the "new" inks are turning color. I thought they were supposed to be totally neutral (no magenta in the 25% ink and no cyan in the 75%). Possibly a reaction with the papers' coatings. I wouldn't rule it out as "archival" if the change occurs during the first ten days or so and then stabilizes. If so it would be possible to add a tad of cool cyan to the inks to counter this "curing" effect. It wouldn't be the first fine art medium that required consideration of aging effects. But that remains to be tested and I'm not sure that either Wilhelm or Rochester has the standards in place to test something like that! Maybe this ink set will have to remain a fine art experimenters set. With all the stable neutral conventional printing inks on the market you'd think it would be easy to come up with something eternally neutral!

Slightly off topic -- Wonder how the new "Low Gamut" CMYK inks will do? They seem to me to be a problem looking for paper to happen on. But the concept "sounds" nice!

-- Dan Culbertson (danculb@concentric.net), October 24, 1999.



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