Fuji Crystal Archive Paper Prints Mounted To Acrylic
Here at Bumblejax we always do our best to provide our customers with as many custom options as possible. Nearly half of our customers are professional photographers who demand the highest quality in printing and mounting and want options with their papers.
All of our customers are thrilled with the vibrancy and depth of our Lexjet Sunset Metallic Photo Paper, but we understand there are also big fans of the Fuji Crystal Archive Paper as well. We definitely encourage those that haven’t seen the Lexjet metallic paper to order a sample to compare and contrast with the Fuji paper.
The Fuji Crystal Archive Paper is a chromogenic print (or C print for short) where a LightJet or Lambda printer using LED’s or lasers in conjunction with a silver halide paper and a chemical process emulates a traditional darkroom photograph. It used to be that C prints were superior to inkjet prints in providing a rich photograph. That is changing and our customers have been thrilled with the depth and vibrancy of our pigment inkjet metallic photo prints (particularly when paired with our acrylic face mounting) for many years now.
We’re an inkjet print lab meaning we use an inkjet printer with archival pigment ink to produce our long-lasting prints. Outside of the fact that inkjet prints offer greater longevity, a wider color gamut, and increasingly more accurate color, the inkjet process is considerably less toxic than a C print process. That’s important to us. There is a terrific blog post and lots of comments discussing all this which we’d highly recommend having a look at. There are always interesting discussions in blogs and forums on C prints vs inkjet prints and they are often heated discussions!
We don’t offer Chromogenic prints, but we do allow our customers to send us their Fuji Crystal Archive Paper prints that they’ve printed elsewhere but want to take advantage of our expertise to have them acrylic face mounted. In fact, we can photo mount your supplied print on any of our other substrates as well (bamboo, birch, aluminum) If you’d like to send us your Fuji print we can do this for you. Here are the requirements and terms of service:
1) For acrylic prints, we need at least 3″ of non-print area on either the left or right of the short side (or top or bottom of a portrait oriented print). For example, the 20×30″ size would need non-print area (3″ of paper on the 20″ side). The remaining three sides will need 1″ of non-print area (essentially a white 1″ border on those three sides and a 3″ of white on the one short side)
2) We are not responsible for damage to customer supplied prints. The mounting process is difficult and while rare, prints do get damaged (air bubbles, spec of dust) either during the mounting process or in shipping to us. If possible, we recommend you send 2 prints so we have a back up in case something happens.
3) Minimum order of $200 required – an acrylic print about 24×16″ and above.
We can face mount other types of papers to acrylic for you as well such as the Kodak Endura which is another popular metallic paper. Not all papers will work with the acrylic process though. The paper must be an inkjet or c print and be completely smooth.
If you have any questions at all or need a quote for mounting your Fuji Crystal Archive print, give us a shout.
We’ll likely tackle this debate of C prints vs archival pigment inkjet prints in a future article. In the meantime, we recommend these pages for a good rundown on the two.
The Ultimate Guide to Digital Printing: Inkjet Prints vs. C-Prints – Part 1