KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA Premier Paper – A New Silver Halide Paper with Improved Color Gamut for both Portrait Social and Commercial Application

In Eastman Kodak Company’s ongoing efforts to further improve the output quality of its silver halide papers Kodak has introduced KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA PREMIER Paper. This paper was developed with new emulsion and dispersion technologies that further enhances color gamut while maintaining critical image quality attributes such as flesh tone and tone scale reproduction. These improvements allow KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA PREMIER Paper to be used in Portrait Social and Commercial applications. This technical paper will review the technologies, as well as the customer benefits provided by this new silver halide paper. Introduction Kodak has had a long standing strategy to design photographic papers to be aligned with digital printing technologies used in the professional market. Most recently the standard professional paper in the portrait social market has been KODAK PROFESSIONAL SUPRA ENDURA VC Paper while the standard professional paper for the commercial market has been KODAK PROFESSIONAL ULTRA ENDURA Paper. Both were designed and optimized for digital printing. KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA Premier continues with this strategy by offering one paper for both markets with increased color gamut and other improvements specifically related to image quality. The product label is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA PREMIER Paper. Product Development The product development of KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA Premier Paper was focused on customer usage of professional photographic paper in digital printers. The development team designed and built a new emulsion and a new imaging dye dispersion. Both are optimized for increased color gamut while maintaining other critical image quality attributes essential for both the portrait social and commercial markets. An accurate flesh tone, including color reproduction, is extremely important to the portrait social market while large color gamut is critical to the commercial market. Other key attributes of a professional paper that are also important to professional lab customers include printer calibration robustness, chemical process stability, and post process applications such as print mounting, retouching and other applications after printing. In addition KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA Premier continues to incorporate the strong image permanence attributes of previous Endura papers. When developing the new paper, and to ensure maintenance of these critical attributes, statistically designed experiments were conducted evaluating silver, gelatin, coupler, and other chemical levels to ensure quality performance that meets customer needs. Once a prototype paper was developed we tested it with key customers so they could assess the product’s performance. With this customer information we optimized the paper and delivered a customer driven professional silver halide paper for use in the portrait social and commercial markets. Product features are shown in Table I. KODAK PROFESSIONAL ENDURA PREMIER Paper Features Table I Features Benefits • Neutral tone scale – from highlights to shadows • Accurate flesh tones • Exceptional highintensity reciprocity characteristics • Optimized for all digital exposing devises, CRT, LED and laser printers • Optimized text fringing This paper was presented at the 4th International Symposium on Technologies for Digital Photo Fulfillment, held Jan. 6-7, 2013, at Bally’s in Las Vegas, Nevada. ©2013 Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). All rights reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the Society. Contributions are reproduced from copy submitted by authors; no editorial changes have been made. [email protected]; www.imaging.org