What advantage does giclee have over traditional photosensitive print making?

Question

I'm trying to figure out why I would want to print giclee.

Let me set some background. I'm a gallery represented artist entering my third season. My sales are good. I print with Bay Photo (via SmugMug) and I'm quite happy with the service and print quality. I print mostly glossy or on metallic paper (using the Kodak Endura paper) and I've dabbled a bit with their "print on metal" service. (Gorgeous but expensive.)

So an photographer friend of mine is looking into giclee. Now I know what it is, I know the history of it (indeed, I'm a software engineer with a background in color science and there is a decent chance that the early Iris printers had some of my code in them, at least in the pre-press arena) but I'm surprised when I see the pricing of traditional photo sensitive paper printing vs giclee.

what advantage does giclee have over traditional photosensitive print making? From smugmug.com, I see an 11x14 is $7.95 on glossy or metallic paper, but $44.20 for a giclee watercolor.

Now I understand perfectly that giclee can make it easy to go large, but a 30x40" glossy is only $66 while a 30x40" giclee is $178.50. So there's no advantage there.

One possible advantage is of course, paper, giclee lets you put your ink down on all sorts of surfaces.

So, aside from paper choice, what advantage does giclee have over traditional photosensitive print making?

Answer

Stan's answer about the archival qualities of a [giclee | inkjet] print (and I won't get into the semantics between the two words) is right on. Inkjet-printed images can be of far greater longevity, considering color-fastness and substrate color constant. This is all a long way of saying, if you are trying to sell something that will last a lifetime, Inkjet/Giclee is a better bet than a Type-R or Type-C print.

The other interesting advantage of using the inkjet technology is that you can apply it to far more surfaces that it would be practical to apply traditional photo-process to. People take it for granted now that they can get prints on canvas and prints on acetate and prints on art paper, etc. That wasn't the case 20 years ago. If you want to see some really fine examples of Giclee printing, track down some by Nash Editions (Graham Nash's company). They really are in a league of their own and their black & white images are particularly compelling.

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