Kodak launched a new inkjet photo paper at the end of January called “Ultima Picture Paper”. The company claims that “When used with the latest inks from various manufacturers, photos printed on the paper will last for more than 100 years in typical home display without protection from gas and humidity.” The owner of the excellent weblog Tommy Blogs has got hold of a pack and tested it with his Canon i9100 printer. Whilst Tommy obviously can’t testify to the longevity of the print, he has reported on the print quality:

“About the printing ? fantastic! I printed the target for Profile Prism around 1:00PM today and let it dry for nearly 8 hours. The profile came out great. The histogram was the best I?ve seen. The dynamic range and color space coverage numbers were slightly below the Canon Photo Paper Pro, but just barely. Although I haven?t tested a range of scenes, I have printed a photo that needs a lot of ink and the results were completely different from anything I have seen from Kodak paper in the past. It was dry to the touch when it came out of the printer and I put my straight edge on it and cut within minutes of that and had no smears, no stickiness, no problems.”

So it seems like Kodak might have cured some of the problems with their inkjet papers - now we just have to wait 100 years to see if they suffer from fading :-)

Website: Tommy Blogs