With each new technology that enters the marketplace comes the question of whether or not it will have any significant, longlasting commercial value. Hindsight can always tell us if buying stocks in certain companies would have made us financially comfortable today, because hindsight is always 20/20. With changes in the imaging industry coming fast and furiously, it's hard to know what to invest in and what to ignore. Currently, one of the hottest products is the photobook. Is there a future in it? Is it a short-lived fad or a new way for consumers to print and share their photos for years to come? The history of photography and photo albums can lead us to a few conclusions about whether this trend should continue or fade into history. This paper explores the facts surrounding this new trend and shows why photobooks can be expected to be around for many years to come.
The presentation 'Evolution of the Photo Book since 2006', will review the latest information and technologies for the binding and retail industry. The topics that will be discussed include: the evolution of the photo book since 2006, requirements for the photo book kiosks and minilabs, and solutions for the photo book kiosks and minilabs.
Traditionally, the color balance of illumination in Degrees Kelvin has been of significant importance due to color sensitivity of film. Today, digital cameras including camera phones have an automatic white balance setting that reduces the importance of illumination color balance over film cameras. However, with the relatively fast pace of change of fluorescent and now light emitting diode (LED) illumination including camera strobes, the quality of light measured by Rendering Index (Ra) may be of more importance than Color Balance (Kelvin). Combining low rendering index values of some artificial light sources with the large color gamuts of inkjet printers versus traditional silver halide printers, increases the effects of color inconsistency and metamerism. While there is no immanent solution, it is important for imaging professionals to be aware this growing concern.
This paper describes how videos can be implemented into printed photo books. More than half of the consumers take videos with DSCs, the other half with camcorders, smartphones and other devices. Therefore consumers making photo books are a great target group to offer a service implementing videos. Using the CEWE PHOTOBOOK software a consumer can select scenes (frames) of the video and have it printed together with a QR code in the product. After receiving the product, the QR code can be scanned with any smartphone or tablet and the movie will be displayed on the mobile device.
In Eastman Kodak Company's ongoing efforts to further improve the output quality of its silver halide papers Kodak has introduced KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA PREMIER Paper. This paper was developed with new emulsion and dispersion technologies that further enhances color gamut while maintaining critical image quality attributes such as flesh tone and tone scale reproduction. These improvements allow KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA PREMIER Paper to be used in Portrait Social and Commercial applications. This technical paper will review the technologies, as well as the customer benefits provided by this new silver halide paper.
From the earliest examples of human-created images – such as depections of Bison and other animals that were painted from 14,000 to 40,000 years ago the walls of the Altimira cave in Cantabria, Spain – images and texts have been preserved as physical objects. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are more than 2,000 years old and consist of carbon based ink inscribed on parchment, lay hidden in caves in the Qumran area near the Dead Sea in Israel until they were discovered in 1946. Preserved in earthen jars in the low-humidity desert environment, the Dead Sea Scrolls are important historical examples of records made with intrinsically long-lasting materials. In the digital age, for the first time in human history, most images and textual information are no longer being preserved as physical objects. Instead, digital images and other records are stored as coded electronic files using the ever-changing technology of hard drives, solid-state flash memory, and magnetic tape systems. Archivists refer to such records as "machine-readable records," which require very specific software and electronic hardware preserved with the digital records to enable future retrieval, viewing, and printing in the future. In contrast, photographic prints and photobooks are physical objects that require neither special hardware nor software to be viewed. Archivists call these "human-readable records." Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, images and texts made with inherently stable materials, can be preserved, accessed, and viewed for thousands of years into the future without any technological aids. This paper discusses the evolution of accelerated aging tests for traditional and digital photographic prints and photobook pages, beginning with the classic 1970 paper by Peter Z. Adelstein, C. Loren Graham, and Lloyd E. West, "Preservation of Motion-Picture Color Films Having Permanent Value," published in the Journal of the SMPTE, which describes the application of predictive accelerated multi-temperature Arrhenius test to evaluate the dark storage permanence properties of color films stored at different temperatures, Utilizing data from accelerated aging tests, guidance is provided in the selection of the longest lasting materials to produce digital photographic prints and photobook pages. When carefully displayed and stored, these printed images and texts – like the Dead Sea Scrolls – can last far into the future.
ISO Technical Committee 42 (Photography), Working Group 5 (Physical Properties and Image Permanence of Photographic Materials) is responsible for developing standards on image permanence and durability. Over the past two years there has been considerable progress by the committee on the development of test method standards for image permanence and durability testing and reporting. Four new methods standards and a test target standard have been published in the last year, and two more method standards are on their way to completion. These seven new standards will be discussed. In addition, work continues on a specification standard that would use the test data to form print life estimates. This proposed standard will be discussed briefly along with the difficulties and complications of making print life predictions. Finally a new standard for testing of photo books has been started and will be discussed briefly as well.
In this paper we describe the various printing technologies, both digital and analog, that are currently being used for commercial printing applications, and the unique aspects of the various marking materials, substrates, and printing systems that influence the resultant permanence and durability of the printed output. The concept of image durability is defined as the combination of image permanence (environmental stability) and print durability (physical stability). Image durability can be thought of as the resistance to degradation of the original image quality of a print or image over time and/or in response to a wide variety of environmental and physical stress factors, individually or in combination. Ultimately, the overall durability of a commercial print will be a function of the ink, the substrate, and any pre- or post-processing steps, all of which need to be carefully co-optimized for the specific handling and other conditions that the print is expected to endure. There are a wide variety of test methods that are available to evaluate the various aspects of image durability. The specific test method and/or test conditions need to be selected with the product-intent application in mind, including any post-printing production processes, as well as final end-use scenarios, in order for the results to be useful for assessing the overall fitness-for-use of the printing technology. Several commercial printing applications will be highlighted as examples of the types of testing that should be carried out in the context of both the expected stress factors and fitness for use for each application.
The purpose of the project was to determine the minimum levels of force and abrasion cycles necessary to produce a just noticeable difference (JND) in objects printed with modern digital presses (documents, book pages, etc.). The results of this work are intended to help cultural heritage institutions that collect these materials develop policies for use and care to prevent damage to their collections. The results may also benefit commercial services that offer prints made with these processes or manufacturers of the equipment or media. A variety of digital press technologies and papers were studied. Specimens were abraded using the Sutherland 2000 Rub Tester with both ¼-lb and 2-lb loads. The lighter weight was an attempt to replicate physical handling of materials such as page turning in books or sorting sheets in stacks of documents. The use of the heavier weight was an attempt to emulate unbound prints being pulled from larger stacks as well as unbound prints in stacks during transport. The abrading surfaces included unprinted and printed sheets to replicate single-sided prints in stacks or doublesided prints in stacks or books. A series of abrasion cycles were produced for each of the materials to determine when JND could be observed. Visual observations were correlated to average grey values to determine if a quantifiable threshold limit for this property was possible. Additionally, the relative sensitivity of the various materials to abrasion was compared. The tests included measuring colorant smear from a black printed area to an adjacent white area, loss of colorant from the black area, and transfer of colorant to an adjacent sheet. The change in average gray levels were measured with image analysis software for both the black patches and adjacent unprinted areas before and after abrasion as well as the transfer of colorant from printed faces to adjacent unprinted papers. Also gloss measurements before and after were used to determine the extent of gloss change in the black patches. The results show that the major factors influencing the extent of damage from abrasion are the printing technology and the printed paper. From previous work it was known that smear of colorant is more objectionable than gloss change. However, with some digital press/paper combinations noticeable gloss change can be seen before noticeable smear of colorant. While not as severe as smear, change in gloss, especially when it is uneven, is still of concern to museum, library, and archive personnel and patrons. Results from the use of the lighter abrasion weight to simulate the turning of pages or sorting of sheets in stacks This paper was presented at the 4th International Symposium on Technologies for Digital indicated that this should not be a problem no matter which printing technology or paper is used as no noticeable damage was observed either by measurement or visual assessment even after many hundreds of abrasion cycles. The heavier weight showed differentiation of the sensitivity of the different printer technology/paper combinations indicating a greater concern is needed for objects that may be inadvertently subjected to higher forces, especially with digital press inkjet technology.