US Technology Preserves Japanese Cultural Heritage

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Gearlog: HP Selected to Preserve 800-Year Old Japanese Art
HP is working with Kyoto International Culture Foundation to preserve 800-year old fine art from 3,500 temples and shrines in Japan. The Kyoto Foundation selected HP to help them create digitized prints of the deteriorating artwork...I had the chance to meet with several HP executives today who told us about the long and tedious process of creating digital prints. It involves capturing the image with a special camera; reproducing the image on Japanese Washi paper made from the inner bark of mulberry and other trees; printing the image using HP's designjet 5500 UV 60-inch large-format printer; applying gold leafs; and mounting and framing for public display. This wasn't an easy task, however. Color matching, especially with the color black, was difficult to match. But HP worked closely with the Kyoto Foundation, developing color profiles. Their efforts worked, because these reproductions look exactly like the originals...[I]f you're in Japan, visit the World Heritage Site in Kyoto to witness firsthand these beautiful reproductions. For more info on HP's art reproduction methods, visit their page on the Spirit of Kyoto.

[Charles]

...Their efforts worked, because these reproductions look exactly like the originals...

Yeah right. An HP inkjet prints looks exactly like paintings made from sumi ink, hand ground mineral pigments, and gold leaf... if you're BLIND.

I've spent many years trying to get people to see beyond the marketing hype surrounding inkjets (or perhaps I should use the phony pseudo-art historical neologism "giclee") and see them for what they really are: cheap, non-archival reproductions with a limited color range. Note that these amazing pronouncements about the supreme quality of inkjets always come from someone trying to sell you inkjets.

There is no such thing as an inkjet process that can come close to the range of colors produced by an artist with a paintbrush and paints. Inkjets are all based on CMYK processes, yet no artists use CMYK paints, it's a process designed for mass production rather than quality. Even the primitive mineral pigments used in nihonga from hundreds of years ago will always be beyond the gamut of CMYK inkjets.