ABSTRACT
Inkjet printers Inkjet printers now dominate the printing market and are especially popular with photographers who are using Photoshop. Inkjet printers come in all shapes and sizes from small desktop devices to huge banner poster printers that are the width of a studio. The fi rst inkjet devices were manufactured by IRIS and designed for commercial CMYK proof printing on a limited range of paper stocks. It was largely due to the experimentation of country rock musician and photographer Graham Nash that the IRIS evolved to become an inkjet printing device suitable for producing fi ne-art prints. This costly venture began in the early nineties and thanks to these pioneering efforts, was soon to revolutionize the world of fi ne-art printing. The IRIS printer stopped production in 2000 and its successor was the IXIA from Improved Technologies. The IRIS/IXIA is still favored by many artists, but in the last decade companies like Epson, HewlettPackard (HP), Canon and Roland have developed high quality wide-format inkjet printers that are suitable for large-format printing, including fi ne artwork applications. The revolution in inkjet technology began at the high end with expensive wide-format printers, but the technology soon diffused down to the desktop. Epson was one of the fi rst companies to produce affordable high quality desktop printers and Epson has retained its lead in printer and consumables technology, always coming out with new and better printers, inks and papers, although companies like Canon and Hewlett-Packard are now beginning to regain their slices of the printer market with printers to rival Epson’s continuing dominance.
