What is a giclée? A printer who wanted to disassociate fine art printing
from "computer printing" used a foreign word to try to make it sound fancy.
Unfortunately it turned out to be a
French word (Wikipedia link)
with a less than appropriate meaning, but the name still stuck. As you can tell
from the Talk page on Wikipedia there is a lot of controversy on the quality
of giclées, since there are no standards for a generic, non-trademarked term.
A better term for modern art printing might be "archival printing". The main
objective is to produce a print that is both fade resistant and high in detail.
This is generally done with a printer that can use pigment inks. Most photo
printers use dye inks which are less expensive, and work better on glossy paper.
More inexpensive pigment printers generally use 4-color inks that are designed
for business printing, not photo/art reproduction. We use ink from Image Specialists,
a well known manufacturer of high quality aftermarket inks.
There are plenty of websites out there that discuss in-depth the differences
between dye and pigment inkjet inks. There are also plenty of disagreements,
flame wars, and flat-out false information as well. We'll just leave a quick
summary here, and encourage you to do more research if you believe it's necessary,
though remember to take everything with a grain of salt!
Remember, there is no such thing as fadeproof printing.
There are a lot of factors that go into image longevity other than UV exposure,
such as ozone contamination and low quality paper. Even good quality paper with
optical brighteners can appear to "dull" a little once the fluorescent chemicals
start to wear out. This is normal.
All our prints except high glossy prints will be made with pigment ink. Standard
gloss and pearlescent gloss prints will be done with dyebased ink. We believe
that dye inks create better results on glossy paper as pigment inks will change
the gloss levels and show "bronzing" - color shifting when looking at the print
at an angle. While dye inks are less fade resistant than pigment inks, as long
as one handles and stores prints with care, there should not be any significant
color shifting with either type of ink. While some pigment systems use an additional
clear-coat "ink" to "re-gloss" a print, this does not preserve the original
gloss of the paper or make pigment work on metallic and pearlescent papers.
Pigment InkAdvantages |
Dyebased InkAdvantages |