In a recent post, I railed at the Inkjet racket. Lest I be perceived as doctrinaire, I do believe there are some good reasons to use inkjet printers, just that price is not one of them.

Here are the cases where I think an inkjet printer is preferable to Fuji Frontier or Noritsu prints on Fuji Crystal Archive paper:

Speed

There is no question sometimes speed matters, and the convenience is worth the price, specially if only proofs are required.

Black & white photography

Printing black and white photos on color materials usually leads to subtle, but discernible color shifts. Although Ilford makes a paper designed specifically for use in digital enlargers like the Lightjet, very few labs offer true B&W digital photo prints, the only one I know of is Reed Digital, using Kodak Portra BW RC paper. RC papers are not archival in any case.

Inkjet printers modified to use the PiezographyBW system can yield black and white photos that match or even exceed the quality of gelatin silver prints. If they use carbon pigment inks, they will be at least as archival (the carbon photographic printing technique is quite ancient and is considered one of the highest forms of photographic printing art, along with platinum printing).

More recently, Hewlett-Packard has introduced the No. 59 photo gray print cartridge for use with its Photosmart 7960 printer. This is a well-supported solution, unlike the finicky Piezography process, but unfortunately, it requires the swellable-polymer HP Premium Plus Photo paper to give decent durability, and is limited to Letter/A4 size. The drying time on swellable polymer paper ranges from a few hours to a day, taking away the immediacy of inkjet prints.

I compared prints made on Ilford Multigrade IV fiber base (baryta) B&W paper, Agfa Multicontrast Premium (resin-coated) B&W paper, Fuji Crystal Archive on a Lightjet, and the HP 7960 on both the glossy and matte HP Premium Plus Photo papers. The prints were compared under daylight conditions (overcast sky), under an incandescent (tungsten) light bulb, and under a compact fluorescent lamp. The results are summarized in the table below.

Color casts

Print paper used	Daylight	Tungsten	Fluorescent
Ilford MGIV FB	Neutral	Neutral	Neutral
Agfa RC	Slightly warm	Slightly warm	Neutral
Fuji Crystal Archive	Slightly blue	Neutral	Slightly purple
HP Premium Plus Photo	Strong Blue	Slight purple	Strong purple

The HP prints give better highlight detail than the Fuji, but fall short of the Agfa. The HP solution is not the silver bullet B&W aficionados were waiting for.

Update (2004-01-22):

The color cast seems to be an issue when the printer is new. After a few weeks of use, the ink cartridge “settles down” and seems far more neutral, better than the Lightjet print. It is not clear whether (1) this problem will reoccur with every new No. 59 cartridge, (2) or whether it was a defect in the cartridge I have, (3) or whether it only happens the first few days after a printer is put in service. As HP cartridges include the print head, I suspect it is option 1 or 2. This would increase the cost of the prints further by increasing waste, but the good news is, the grayscale output from the printer is competitive with the darkroom given the superior level of control you get from Photoshop, and this is the first mass-market printer that can really make this claim.

Matte prints

Unlike fiber papers, RC papers seldom have true matte finishes. The so-called “lustre” finish is in reality a process in which the surface of the paper is calendared (pressed by textured rollers) to imprint a pebble-grained finish, which is a mere ersatz of real matte photo paper. As this is not a microscopic finish, it diffuses light unevenly and when seen at an angle, the print is washed out by the reflections from the textured surface.

A printer like the Epson Stylus Photo 2100/2200 using pigmented inks can make durable and almost painterly prints on fine watercolor papers from the likes of Hahnemühle or Crane’s. Many fine art photographers favor this printer for that very reason.