General Information About Ink Archival Properties and Color Fade

Xerox solid-ink printers are designed primarily for office use. In this environment, dark storage is generally used for the long-term archiving of documents. The documents and inks are not exposed to light once archived. All Xerox printers have excellent dark storage archivability.

Light fastness can vary greatly for a single set of printer inks depending on environmental conditions, media, type of light, intensity, angle of exposure, etc. Accelerated tests can provide an indication of relative stability, but cannot be accurately extrapolated to predict stability in a typical environment.

Our solid ink products are dye based. Pigment based colorants are generally more lightfast. Our solid ink printers will produce output that is stable and usable exposed to office lighting environment for a year or more. Exposure to sunlight outdoors will greatly increase the rate of fading. Depending on conditions and orientation, it can be reasonable to use solid ink output in an outdoor environment for up to three weeks. The good news about solid ink is that it is waterfast, and generally has equal or better lightfastness when compared to dye based liquid ink.  

Our color lasers use pigment based toners. In general, these will be much more lightfast than dye based inks. In some cases the light exposure tolerance is increased by more than a factor of 10X. This is the best desktop printer choice for someone whose primary consideration is lightfastness. It is reasonable to expect 2 years or more usability in office lighting, and up to two months outdoors. We do not provide an explicit guarantee for lightfastness of printer output, individual results will vary widely depending on light levels and environmental conditions.

UV reflective coatings, laminates, or other form of protective covering may significantly improve light fastness (lamination may not work well with solid ink images).  

Both solid ink and laser produce output that is very stable in dark-storage. Print samples of earlier solid ink printer products have been stored in a file more than 8 years with no noticeable degradation. It is reasonable to expect dark storage archivability to exceed 10 years, but this also is not guaranteed.