Over the past five years, improvements in inkjet printing technology have enabled explosive growth in digital fine art printing. What is digital fine art and why is it worthy of specific consideration?

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." Since digitally printed art certainly meet those criteria, the only question is whether digital art can be called fine art. At this year’s PMA, we were informed of a professionally printed 26x90-inch Epson print that sold for $1.2 million. Fine Art? $1.2 million? Sounds about right.

Often called Giclée printing, digital fine art is the digital production, or reproduction, of fine art prints. The term fine art implies the use of high quality supplies and substrates to provide a high level of longevity, which requires finishing services such as lamination or framing. Perhaps because of these implications, digital fine art has been considered by many in the large format industry as a specialty application produced only by artists and other specialists. Not any more. CAP Ventures research indicates that digital fine art has become a mainstream application, produced by a wide variety of print service providers (PSPs).

What effect does this have on digital fine art? Is real digital fine art produced only by those who specialize in its production and understand its special requirements? Is it fine art if it is produced by a company’s internal art department or by a quick printer?

CAP Ventures says yes. The users surveyed generally understand that digital fine art printing has special requirements and a special focus on longevity and image quality. While print service providers may not have the same kind of finishing capabilities or offer the kind of unique services that fine art specialists or digital artists offer, the availability of high quality inks and substrates have enabled the production of high quality digital fine art by a wide variety of end users.

One of the ways to certify that these are high-value prints is by asking: who is buying these prints? The survey respondents indicated that the primary audience for selling large format digital fine art is the artist or photographer that created the print or image. The secondary market is consumers. CAP Ventures suggests that consumer fine art, for the most part, could be considered "poster-art" while business-to-business art sales should be considered fine art production and reproduction.

This report examines the use of digital printers for producing fine art in North America based on primary research performed by CAP Ventures in cooperation with Digital Output magazine.

Fine Art Printer Profile
An analysis of respondents indicates that there are essentially three types of companies producing digital fine art: PSPs (print service providers) who produce art among a number of applications; fine art printing specialists; and digital artists, who produce digital originals but are not in the print-for-pay business.

Out of those who responded, 70 percent are in the print-for-pay business. There are a wide variety of companies presently producing digital fine art: sign shops, repro shops, screen printers, service bureaus, in-plant printers and quick printers, which runs contrary to the assertion that digital fine art is a specialty or niche application.

Size of Company
The majority of companies that are producing digital fine art today are small companies; 88 percent have annual sales of less than $5 million. The vast majority have fewer than 10 employees.

Digital fine art is certainly an emerging application area. Although nearly 30 percent of the survey respondents indicated they have been producing digital fine art for more than five years, CAP Ventures believes these are the gurus of the fine art market. There is also a large number of users that are newcomers to the digital fine art market: 45 percent have only started to produce fine art in the last two years.

Large Format Digital Equipment
There are two primary technologies that are used to produce digital fine art: inkjet and digital photographic. 97.8 percent of respondents indicated that they have an inkjet printer. Inkjet offers the best combination of print quality, substrate flexibility and low investment cost for small PSPs and other art-producing companies. Digital photographic equipment, led by the Ocè Display Graphics Systems LightJet and the Durst Lambda, is high-end equipment used for producing high quality images on photographic paper.

Brand Share
From a hardware standpoint, the digital fine art market is led by Epson, which has twice the brand share (58 percent) among fine art producers that HP (28 percent) has. Epson’s combination of high print resolution, low hardware prices, and excellent brand in the graphic design industry, with Macintosh-oriented creatives that are digital artists, make them the leader in this application area.

Roland, which uses the Epson print head in their printers, is the third leading brand (11.6 percent) while MacDermid ColorSpan (10.1 percent), which has offered a Giclee-specific printer for a number of years, is fifth in the segment of the large format market.

Not surprisingly, given the fact that most of the companies involved in the digital fine art market are small companies, most of those producing digital fine art have only one (50 percent) or two (30 percent) large format printers for producing fine art.

Purchase Plans
Close to one-third, or 33 percent, of the survey respondents indicated that they expect to invest in additional hardware for producing digital fine art over the next 12 months. While this is a rather conservative number when compared to other CAPV studies that ask the same question, it should be noted that a high percentage of these survey respondents have just come into producing digital fine art.

Among those users who suggested that they definitely plan to acquire a new printer for producing digital fine art, inkjet and digital photographic will remain the primary technologies. The most common reason users cited for acquiring a new large format printer for producing fine art was to add print capacity. The second most common reason is to replace older equipment.

A majority of respondants, 84 percent, indicated that they are completely satisfied or mostly satisfied with their present large format fine art printing solution.

The Digital Crossover
There was another very interesting finding as it related to large format digital printing. We asked respondents how large a print run has to be before they would move their fine art printing off their digital devices. The mean number of prints fine art printers indicated they would produce on their large format digital printer is 129. This result really is fascinating because, with the high cost of premium large format color inkjet supplies, both ink and media, we would have expected users to have a lower threshold for moving print volume onto other types of printers.

There are several factors that CAP Ventures believes contribute to this reticence to moving print volume onto analog devices:

Capacity and Control – Most of these users have large format inkjet printers, but do not have analog equipment. This means that to move larger jobs onto analog equipment, they have to relinquish control of their fine art output.

Quality – Today’s large format inkjet printers are capable of producing such high quality prints that many users believe there will be substantial degradation of their image if they produce these images using other methodologies. Additionally, with the durability requirements of fine art applications, many users want to know their prints were produced using high-quality pigmented inks and archival quality media, which are readily available for inkjet printing.

Output Volume & Requirements
Survey respondents indicated that digital fine art made up 40 percent of their large format output. Since many of these printers are producing fine art among other applications, CAP Ventures believes that the perception of digital fine art printing as a specialty application is not entirely accurate.

For the print provider, printer vendor and supplies producer, one of the most important questions about digital fine art is what happens to the print once it is finished. The conditions for fine art vary widely, according to the survey respondents, which indicated that 47.8 percent of fine art prints are displayed indoors under glass, while 30 percent are framed, laminated and hung on a wall. Poster-style output – an unfinished print hung on a wall – accounts for 22.2 percent of the output.

The implication of these varying conditions is that suppliers must be aware that user expectations vary dramatically. From a strategic standpoint, that probably means that there is room in this market for more temporary types of large format fine art supplies products as well as higher-end, longer-term solutions.