By David Saffir

The water resistance of inkjet prints is an aspect of print durability that you may not have thought much about--unless you or your clients have accidentally spilled a drink or sneezed while handling your prints. (Hey, it happens!) Thankfully, HP and others have made great strides in improving how well an inkjet print can stand up to the rigors of everyday handling and display, including the ability to resist incidental contact with small amounts of water.

And while no one really expects a print on photo paper to be totally waterproof, haven’t you ever wondered exactly just how water-resistant an inkjet photo paper really is?

Not long ago, I was making prints on the HP Photosmart B9180 printer with several friends: Neil Snape, Fred Zuill, and Harald Johnson. In the middle of our work (with deadlines looming large) Neil piped up and said, “I wonder how these new pigment inks will do in water!”

Of course, the next thing he did was to take a print over to the kitchen sink, turn on the water, and toss the print in. It survived, without a run or a sniffle. The “Snape Protocol” was born.

Fast forward to the introduction of the new, 12-ink Designjet Z3100 printer which uses the Vivera pigment-based inks. In the midst of making test prints I thought back to Neil’s experiment in the kitchen sink. Grabbing a test print, I walked over to the sink and carefully repeated the test using the Snape Protocol. This print was made on HP Premium Instant-dry Satin Photo Paper and the Z3100 had been printing with the Gloss Enhancer enabled. Again, the print survived. In fact, water just beads up and runs off the printed surface.

My faithful assistant Jeremy was present during this testing. After some discussion, we decided to repeat the test on a much larger scale, using a bigger, more powerful water stream. Again, the print survived without a hitch, run, or streak.

To visually document the success of our totally non-scientific durability test, we set up and shot this photograph. Wouldn’t you agree that a good photograph can be worth a thousand tables of test data?