Giclee Prints

Fine art printing has become even more precise with the revolutionary Giclee (gee-clay) printing process. The Giclee printer produces a fine art print equal, if not superior, in quality to any classical handmade printing method. 

The word Giclee itself is French, meaning spurt or squirt, in this case meaning "spray of ink". In the Giclee process, a fine stream of ink is sprayed onto archival paper. The resulting print has a higher resolution than a lithograph and the dynamic color range is like a serigraph.  

Unlike a conventional press, the Iris printer, on which Giclees are printed, is a drum based technology. The substrate is wrapped around the drum, the drum spins, and the four nozzles each containing a separate color (CMYK) travel along the drum spraying ink and forming the image.   The virtually continuous tone inkjet technology, with its micro drop size and 1800 dpi perceived resolution, has the ability to reproduce 512 levels of gray per color.  

The inks and paper used in these prints offer light fastness and UV resistance under museum archival conditions. The process of making each Giclee print is slow and exacting. The outstanding results exceed the expectations of even the most demanding collector. Giclee prints are shown in many museums and fine art galleries throughout the world. 

Dye-Sublimation Prints

Dye-sublimation printers allow you to print photo-lab-quality pictures.  In dye-sublimation printing, colors are not laid down as individual dots, as is done in inkjet printers. Individual dots can be distinguished at a relatively close distance, making digital pictures look less realistic.

If you looked inside a dye-sublimation printer, you would see a long roll of transparent film that resembles sheets of red, blue, yellow, and gray colored cellophane stuck together end to end. Embedded in this film are solid dyes corresponding to the four basic colors used in printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The print head heats up as it passes over the film, causing the dyes to vaporize and permeate the glossy surface of the paper before they return to solid form.

So the main difference between this and other types of printing has to do with heat. The vaporized colors permeate the surface of the paper, creating a gentle gradation at the edges of each pixel, instead of the conspicuous border between dye and paper produced by inkjets. And because the color infuses the paper, it is also less vulnerable to fading and distortion over time.