Through the history of inkjet printing, a wide variety of colorants, coatings, and supports have been used to create fine art and professional photographs collected by museums and other cultural institutions. These materials have shown, through anecdotal experience as well as scientific study, a high degree of variability with respect to decay under room condition storage. Theory, as well as experimentation, has indicated that progressively lower storage temperatures should result in progressively longer lifespans. However, there is concern that crossing the threshold into freezing conditions could have adverse effects on the image quality of prints or the physical integrity of coatings and supports as has been found with other fine art and photographic materials through history. The experiments in this project investigated whether freezing and thawing would significantly alter the physical integrity or visual appearance of inkjet prints. Printed targets and non-printed sheets were tested for a variety of common deterioration forms including ink bleed, paper yellowing, change in gloss, coating embrittlement, and increase in abrasion sensitivity. Non-frozen controls and samples that had been frozen at -12° Celsius for one week and then thawed were tested and compared for the above types of decay. The freezing and thawing was shown to have no adverse effects on the prints. Freezing conditions can therefore be used as a storage option to maximize life expectancy for these materials. Validation of the use of below freezing temperature storage conditions for these materials is a critical addition to the literature on the subject of inkjet print care.
Ivey Barker, Daniel Burge, "Safety of Freezing Inkjet Prints for Long Term Storage" in Proc. Int'l Symp.on Technologies for Digital Photo Fulfillment, 2016, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4672.2016.7.1.art00006