Marie T. <MPennay@prodigy.net> writes on 19 February 2000 at 05:44:47 -0600 > The discussion on how the 1200 OEM ink is going to fade > gives me a vision of the pictures I've printed just fading > into nothingless after a short period of time. > > Would laminating slow down or prevent fading? What about a > UV spray - would that be the way to go in conjunction with > OEM ink? There has been a little referring here to UV > sprays, but guess I missed any original thread on it that > would tell me what is available and where to get it. Considerable personal experience, as reported on this list, shows that some coatings will considerably extend the life of the Epson OEM materials. "Informal tests" (carefully conducted, but not under completely controlled humidity and light levels) by people on this list support this pretty clearly. (No doubt the exact product matters; people who've had experience and/or conducted tests can no doubt tell you what they used). The results, as I remember them, suggest that you can get lives into at least small numbers of years this way. Coatings are much more controversial for prints intended for "infinite" lifetimes (or prints intended to be "archival"). (Nobody, of course, expects an actual infinite lifetime, but that's what we *want*). Some people argue that if it extends the life of materials over the short run, it should over the long run too. Others argue that stuff in coatings could damage otherwise archival materials in the long run, and that this would not show up in the short-term tests conducted by people on the list. Wilhelm has also published some (inconveniently unspecific) things generally condemning coatings for long-term preservation of prints. I'm definitely in the camp of people skeptical about use of coatings for long-term preservation, as many people want for art prints for example. (Apologies to my worthy adversaries if any of you think I've mangled your position on this.) -- Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ Minicon: http://www.mnstf.org/minicon Bookworms: http://ouroboros.demesne.com/ SF: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b David Dyer-Bennet / Welcome to the future! / dd-b@dd-b.net - Please turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for instructions.