On Tue, 10 Dec 1996, Stephen Nowlin wrote:

> My experience with scanned and computer printed images is that they do not
> yet  match the resolution of film-based prints.  They're close, but not
> quite there yet.  Their longevity is also questionable -- I believe I can
> already see some deterioration of digital images printed 8 x 10" after only
> two years.  They are, however, less expensive and the resolution is
> acceptable enough that I have opted for using them to send to newspaper
> media in press packets.

In my experience this is true.  We had some poster-size images produced
for a show from digital images created on the computer in Adobe
Photoshop. They were on the soft and blurry side, but they were being
presented more to create an atmosphere for a video installation than as
information, so that
looked okay.  The place that produced them would only guarantee them for 2
months against fading.  We had them displayed under relatively low light
levels, so they held up well, and looked fine when they were used at the
next venue several months later.  A different artist recently showed me an
Iris
print, made on an ink-jet printer, also poster-size, which was very crisp
and detailed and which he expects to last indefinitely, although I can't
verify that (do any of the conservators on the list know?).

As Ivy Strickler pointed out in another post on this topic, there is a
real art to scanning and to planning your image while you're working in
Photoshop to reproduce well on your intended output device.  You just
can't expect it to come out the way it looks on your screen
automatically--it has to be planned correctly from the beginning. In the
case
I describe above, (the first artist I mention) I learned this the hard
way.  The artist who
produced the images *thought* he knew a lot more about Photoshop than he
actually did.  Consequently, the company that produced the poster-sized
images had a very difficult time working with his output.

--Helen Glazer
Exhibitions Director
Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, USA
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