And what do you think they will print it on? If it's larger than an 8x10", they're gonna do a giclée print — the art community's snobby and inadvertently perverted term for, you guessed it, an inkjet print.
Yes, for smaller prints you can get it printed on actual silver halide photo paper. But it's not really better than inkjet in terms of print quality. And an inkjet print using archival pigment inks should be more lightfast than a silver halide print, since the color dyes in silver halide paper are not as stable as pigments.
For smaller sizes there's also dye sublimation, though you really only find it at those instant-gratification photo print kiosks at stores anymore.
I hope you do realize that there is a difference between a large, high resolution professional quality inkjet printer or plotter (like the ones used for A0 posters, for example) that is running almost nonstop with proper maintenance and the crappy consumer disposable inkjets.
Not all inkjets are made equal.
Sure. But the print quality from good desktop printers is superb. The larger printers often have lower resolution, since their prints will not be viewed from as close. But you are absolutely right about the maintenance. That said, there are huge differences in the maintenance needs among desktop inkjets - the Canons with individual ink tanks tend to be very tolerant. My 9 year old MP970 prints perfectly every time, whether it's been a day or two months between prints. I've literally never had to run an extra cleaning cycle on it.
I remember using a colour wax printer at work (I think I may have mentioned this in some other thread somewhere). I think it was the Phaser 850 or 860 from memory (and yes, it was one of the Tektronix branded units before Xerox bought their printer division).
It used solid wax blocks as ink. It produced some fantastic images at up to 1200dpi resolution. The downsides outweighed the good however; The wax was very expensive, the print speed was slow (about 3.5 pages per minute at the highest quality) and you literally had to wait for the printer to warm up so it could melt the wax before printing. Cleaning the print mechanism was easy, it would simply run a routine which heated the print heads and other components so that the wax became liquid and dumped it into a waste tray.
These are the solid ink blocks it used:
It was certainly one of the more interesting printers I've used.
I think Xerox still makes solid ink printers, in fact!
While you remember them as slow, they were actually among the fastest printers of their time - provided they were kept on so the ink was already melted. (Every warmup cycle used a ton of ink, so these were terrible for sporadic use. They were great office workgroup printers though.) Their print quality was better than color lasers of the time, but they kinda stagnated in this regard. Modern lasers far exceed the quality of today's solid ink printers. (Liquid) inkjets are so far ahead it's not even funny.
On speed: these use a full page width print head. They expelled ink onto a transfer drum, which then rolled it onto paper. They whir for a few seconds with no visible action, and then suddenly spit the printed page out at a startling speed. The models of around 2001 (Phaser 860 I think) were around 10 pages per minute in standard mode, and provided the machine was already warmed up, this speed was no joke; these things had beast processors in them, and by the time you made it down the hall to the printer, the first few pages were already waiting for you. .
One of the unique features of these printers is that InkStix can be loaded without even pausing a print job. (As can the paper, which isn't so exotic.)
I have one, Phasor 360, and the only reason I have it is because the consumables are so expensive, and the machine will use a block of each colour wax per startup cycle, and if you leave it on will use a box of them ( 3 colour, black is free, and if you actually want more it literally is a free add on to the next order) per month, which is a not small running cost. Add to that a maintenance tray, which is an oil bag ( nice silicone oil), a wiper and a waste ink tray, plus a gear driven flag that is going to tell you at 1000 pages it needs to be replaced. I just used a screwdriver to work the ratchet off and wound the tray gear back to the beginning to fix that, you had over 2l of oil there and would use 50ml in the 1000 pages. I used to print pages with white test on a black background with it, simply because it would do so, and there was no cost for the ink if you wanted a colour page otherwise.
Only issue was the printing would smear, and if left in the sun or heated ( like in a laminator) they would really smear and go through the paper. Always wonder how it would work as a PCB transfer method, if it were not for the silicone oil contamination on each page from the oil coat on the transfer drum.
BTW the way they work is they have 160 (IIRC) piezoelectric print heads on a bar, 40 per colour, and make an image on the heated oil coated drum by spinning it and stepping across the drum generating a series of wax droplets ( different sizes for intensity along with a dither pattern) till they had made a full pass and made a full image on the drum. Then paper feed took a sheet, warmed it up to slightly below the melting point of the wax, and passed it so it touched the drum and picked up and cooled the wax image, then used a PTFE coated roller to ensure adhesion and popped it out the top. Would also work with laser tranparencies.
Early ones had a free recall and upgrade after a few of them had the PTC drum heater catch fire, the mod was a new PTC heater, a fan for it to move the air, and an extra few one shot thermal fuses along with a temperature thermoswitch for improved control. Took a day to install as well by the local tech. They also have an internal ultrasonic cleaner for the print heads, and a vacuum purge for the heads as well for shut down. We had one scrapped because of a paper jam, they turned the machine off, and the paper jam became one with the drum, and then they tried to remove it with a knife, scratching the drum.