Here's an interesting thing. This colour image was printed in ... 1939. The best part of a lifetime ago.
The blacks and colour are at least as good as any I've seen from inkjet on similar paper. It's sharp, too.
The above scan has not been enhanced or retouched. In fact it's slightly less neutral than the original, with just a little added saturation in the purple. The base has perhaps yellowed slightly, but it's no more off-white than many modern papers that don't use chemical brighteners, or C-41. Has it faded? There is no sign. Have the colours gone awry with selective deterioration? Even skintones are perfectly balanced. Has it been specially looked after in a controlled environment? No chance, it has survived nearly 70 years of summers and winters sandwiched between ordinary not-very-acid-free book pages. Eat your heart out, Epson.
It is a 10"x8" plate from 'Colour Photography in Practice' by D.A. Spencer, Ph.D, F.I.C, Hon.F.R.P.S, published by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd and Henry Greenwood & Co Ltd in 1939. The book is a sort of 'Clerc' of colour photography (or perhaps a contemporary Bruce Fraser:), describing the theory and practical state of the art almost at the beginning of photographers' interest in colour as a mainstream process.
Commercial colour printing was then in its infancy, and the couple of dozen or so colour images have been printed separately and gummed to blank pages along each edge.
What is astonishing is their sheer quality and how well they have endured.
The face is about 1" (25mm) in height, but no dot screen is visible to the naked eye, although if you use a decent loupe it is there. 400ppi scanning doesn't pick it up though.
The print has a delicate slight eggshell sheen, just off completely matte. It's lovely.
In fact it's a colour gravure process. I presume a short-run flatbed type for sheet printing.
So despite looking for all the world like a very nice modern inkjet print, it's made by an utterly different and vastly more arduous process. Still, I am shocked by how good it is. Although modern gravure is often used for black and white art-photo books, I have never before come across such fine colour gravure. The book says the prints were made by the L.C.C. School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, Bolt Court.
There's no trace of metamerism, either :-)
Oh yes, and no colour film was used. There wasn't any colour negative material at this time, so it was shot using monochrome film and red, greem and blue colour separation filters with a quarter-plate Vivex Automatic Repeating back camera. And you thought Canon Series 1 cameras were big lumps? Those 3 knobs on the back are separate shutter controls, one for each separation negative. Top shutter speed 1/16th second.
And here's some more food for thought. Anyone who has some slight familiarity with early colour photography (like me - I'm no expert) will have heard of (a) Autochrome, (b)Dufaycolor (c)Agfa transparency processes, but look at photomicrograph (d) Finlay... It's almost a Bayer grid, but the RGB filters are on top of the monochrome emulsion instead of an array of electronic sensors. Amazingly, Finlay crammed in 240 of these filter squares per inch. So quarter-plate Finlay tarnnies would have been 780x1020 'pixels' - 0.8Megapixels. Maybe there has been some progress after all.
Hello. I am very interested on the TRi color process, particulary with the VIVEX camera manufactured in England. Do you have any pictures , leaflets ...about this camera. BTW, wat is the model pictured on tripod. Thank you very much Michel ROUX auvernet@hotmail.fr