Ink Jet Printing with Pigmented Inks for Photofinishing

Abstract

Ink jet printing technology is open to various applications because of advantages such as popularization of relatively cheap printers, litter free printing, ease of operation, easy maintenance, ability to print onto non-flat media, and ease of making prints of various sizes. However, some improvements are still needed in the application of photofinishing to replace color silver halide photographic prints. There are two kinds of ink jet printing systems in terms of inks: dye-based inks and pigmented ones. We know empirically that dye-based inks can produce better print quality than pigmented inks in many instances. Typical weak points of pigmented ink images are conspicuous grain, uneven low gloss, and bronzing. Pigmented ink images, however, generally show better image permanence than dye ink images. We have produced many ink jet prints with both kinds of inks and examined the characteristics of these images. Finally we focused our attention on the pigmented ink images. We determined the possibility of managing both image permanence and print quality, using microporous printing media with a specially coated layer for pigmented inks. We conclude that ink jet printing with pigmented inks can be applied for photofinishing purposes.