What you can expect when you upgrade your Epson UltraChrome K3 printer to Piezography K7 inks.

The 4 additional shades of Piezography carbon black ink will produce significantly higher levels of detail from high resolution files, better shadow and highlight definition, and a more perfect tonal latitude from dMin to dMax.

In fact, only Piezography K7 inks and profiles resolve 256 separate levels of gray in a perfect linearization. Not silver print, nor platinum print can come close to the perfect linearization capabilities of Piezography inks when combined with Piezography profiles.

It is a significant upgrade to your printer when you replace your Ultrachrome K3 color inks with the dedicated black & white Piezography K7 ink set. You just need to ask yourself if your work is worth upgrading to Piezography quality. Piezography has been the standard for black & white photographers since 2000.

A serious problem with light fastness information on modern inkjet prints to this point has been that the test methods currently used by the imaging industry to provide this information rely on a decades-old method used to test silver halide color photography. Traditional color photos contain just three isolated dye layers (cyan, magenta and yellow) and the fade test results are measured by densitometers not modern colorimeters or spectrophotometers. Exposed to light until just one of nine color patches fades to liberal consumer-oriented tolerances that allow as much as 35% loss in density, the entire range of color performance is then extrapolated from this single testing endpoint into a prediction of print "display life".  While this method worked reasonably well for traditional CMY color photography and consumer photofinishing expectations, it has produced inconsistent results for modern inkjet systems.  Neutrals, near-neutrals, and even shadow tones for that matter cannot be properly evaluated by the traditional test method, and those liberal tolerances used to make the display life predictions have also resulted in widely exaggerated claims by manufacturers about print life expectations.  "Easily noticeable fade"  is not  an appropriate standard for most artists, museum curators, and collectors of fine art prints. With Epson's test results blind to color shift, black & white photographers making their prints with Epson ABW can expect to see magenta shift in as little as 8 Gallery Years (70 MegLux).

Although Epson guarantees a 35% density loss with Epson ABW inks, they have not provided any test results concerning color shift - and cannot with the industry test they are using. You need to decide whether your work is good enough for Piezography or whether Epson ABW is good enough for your work. In the meantime, we are relying on the Aardenburg Imaging and Archives to provide meaningful testing data to our customers. Vermont PhotoInkjet is the first corporate sponsor of Aardenburg. We'll be providing memberships for our customers so that they can see for themselves why Aardenburg's I*metric light-stability methods will become the new industry standard, and why its designed for users of these products rather than to suit the manufacturers of these products.