Explosive growth of Digital Photography has led to the development of new service concepts for consumer printouts with digital cameras. In the near future the majority of those owners of digital cameras will not want to spend their time printing photos at home with a slow inkjet printer. Estimated 85% of amateur photographers will hand their memory devices to a service organisation, which will provide them with printouts in a matter of days or even hours.Digital Printing is a perfect setup for such services as it is designed for VIP (variable information printing), provides high quality color and operates on an on demand basis. Convergence of Digital Photography and Digital Printing happens at the right time and at a stage, where there is plenty of room for mutual synergism and improvement as both technologies are still in early evolution.In order to ease the transfer from traditional analog wet photofinishing to digital printing, customers must experience the same look and feel of their photos, to which they have been used to over the past decades. True photo-paper with special top coats for the new digital inks and toners can provide those accustomed properties.This paper gives an overview of the design and properties of such photo-papers, developed for trouble-free operation on digital photo-presses (especially the Xeikon D2F2).
Dieter Reichel, "Photofinishing Paper for Digital Presses" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP17), 2001, pp 151 - 153, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2001.17.1.art00030_1