The composite, long term storage stability of inkjet prints is influenced by four factors that can be separated and quantified. In this paper, lightfastness, darkfastness and color bleed of inkjet prints are discussed. No mention is made in this paper to the fourth IJ degradation factor of waterfastness. Specifically in this paper, the kinetics of the lightfastness degradation process is described. Globally, pseudo first order kinetics for the color degradation process is obeyed by most, but not all, ink and media combinations examined for short exposure times to strong light sources. In the absence of a concrete first order kinetic model, the confluence of temperature and light flux on the image degradation process is discussed. In addition, information about the long term deleterious effects of image bleed are presented. In the opinion of the authors, these three image degradation processes need significant control in order for inkjet photo printing to continue approaching that of traditional color photography.
Steven J. Sargeant, Tao Chen, Bharti Parikh, "Photoquality PQ and Durability Constraints For Inkjet Media" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP14), 1998, pp 138 - 141, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.1998.14.1.art00034_1