One-off inkjet prints for art museum visitors: "Take a Monet home" is Boston Fine Art Museum motto.

With hundreds of thousands of museums around the world selling high-quality fine-art reproductions of their collections, exhibition posters, and display photography, a new market has opened for in-house inkjet printing departments, as well as inkjet printing bureaus servicing the museum customers' orders.

Ideally, it's a printing service that operates within the museum, so visitors can select, pay for, and walk away with the reproductions of their choice. Such a system makes economic sense, since it eliminates so many drawbacks of long-term warehousing of graphic arts printed reproductions.

With this model, museums need only initially scan high-resolution digital files of their most popular works of art and, through time, continue to include more obscure ones to provide a wide range of items for collectors' tastes. The system does involve setting up a staff-run inkjet printing center and archival high-resolution image scanning. But, Printing On Demand (POD) eliminates many marketing headaches involved in stocking a large variety of graphic arts printed "products."

High-quality, one-off giclee (inkjet) reproductions for sale immediately solve several point-of-sale problems:

* Everything is in stock; every scanned picture is available.

* Different print sizes of the same artwork are also accessible.

* Products don't take up valuable shop space, gathering dust under a counter or in a back room.

* Each printed item is pre-sold, and there's no investment in warehoused inventory.

* No old, dog-eared copies are left to be remaindered.

* Every purchaser receives a fresh, colorful copy of the painting he or she desires.

* An on-the-spot framing service can also add revenue.

From a retailer's standpoint, what could be better?

"Monet for the masses"

Called by some "Monet for the masses," a pioneer in this revolutionary approach to fine-art reproduction is the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, Mass., which has recently installed a 44-inch-wide Epson Stylus Pro 9600 inkjet printer and is selling individual, one-off prints from the Museum Bookstore & Shop and from the museum's website at www.mfa-publications.org. Consumers take home, at reasonable prices, their favorite images, which are "meticulously" reproduced on Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art Paper with Epson UltraChrome Ink.

"Digitizing works in the collection and actually seeing the results from our in-house specialists is an exciting step forward for museums like the MFA," comments Debra LaKind, MFA head of Rights, Licensing and Visual Archives. "We're amazed at how easy it is to create digital fine-art reproductions that meet our requirements of color accuracy and longevity. The additional revenue stream generated by the sale of fine-art prints allows us an opportunity to provide increased digital access to the collection."

Inkjet reproductions are also available for sale at galleries displaying MFA works on loan, through MFA traveling exhibitions and other venues, and through licensing agreements with corporate buyers or interior designers. For example, the MFA Epson prints are available at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, Nev., where they complement the exhibition, "Claude Monet: Masterworks from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston," where 21 Monet paintings from the MFA are on loan.

The MFA feels its own staff has the best ability to make the original high-resolution digital color photographs and painstakingly adjust the color to match the printed reproduction to the original.

"Who better to create the print than the museum staff itself?." observes LaKind. "We have direct access to the work of art, so we can color correct against the original, not just a transparency or digital file. Furthermore, we can draw from our vast archive of images and offer thousands of reproduction possibilities," she continues.

Print longevity important

The museum reproduces the consumer prints on the piezo-inkjet Epson Stylus Pro 9600 at 1,440-by-720 dpi resolution.

"One reason the prints look so real is our proven photo lighting technique, which treats the painting as a 3-D object with surface dimension," explains John Woolf, MFA senior digital imaging and photography specialist. "But, the final key to the puzzle is the combination of the Epson printer, inks, and paper."

Unlike dye-based inks, the Epson UltraChrome pigmented inking system is archival. When prints are framed under glass (protected from ultraviolet light) and displayed under normal indoor lighting conditions, they will last for 100 years without noticeable fading, according to Wilhelm Imaging Research, a leading independent testing lab for the longevity of color printing materials (www.wilhelm-research.com).

Both the UltraChrome inks and UltraSmooth Fine Art Paper are free-tuned for maximum longevity; for example, the 500-gram paper is 100 percent cotton, acid-free, optical brightener-free, buffered archival inkjet paper. It has a special inkjet coating engineered for the highest resolution and color saturation possible, using current digital printing technology. When reproducing black-and-white photographic prints, the printer employs a standard pigment Black ink, along with a new Light Black pigment ink, to better capture the subtle tones of fine-art photography.

The MFA currently offers reproductions in three sizes: 16-by-20 inches ($125), 20-by-24 inches ($180), and 24by-30 inches ($260). Custom-sized printing and larger-sized prints will be offered in the future, according to the Museum.

Get "Masterpieces On Demand" in the United Kingdom

In Great Britain, London's National Gallery introduced an interactive kiosk last July that offers visitors the opportunity to purchase free-art reproductions of more than 900 paintings from the museum's collection. Eventually, the museum plans to have its entire collection of 2,300 Western European paintings from Da Vinci and Van Gogh to Rembrandt and Titian available for fine-art reproductions. When the scanning project is completed, the image server is expected to hold more than 4 terabytes of data.

The "Masterpieces On Demand" program is a partnership between Hewlett-Packard Europe, Geneva, Switzerland (www.hp.com), and the National Gallery in England. The touch-screen kiosk produces A2 (16.54-by-23.39 inches), A3 (11.69-by-16.54 inches), and A4 (8.27-by-11.69 inches) size prints while visitors wait. The kiosk employs a 42-inch, six-color, 1,200 dpi HP Design Jet 5500PS large-format printer for the reproductions, and an HP PhotoSmart 7550 inkjet printer for generating a certificate of authenticity for the buyer. Also part of the engineering is a HP Workstation xw8000 that runs the print applications, and HP customized printing software for the National Gallery. The Design Jet employ HP photo-quality inkjet inks and media for archival permanence.

The kiosk's touch screen browser permits visitors to search the vast digital archive. HP software helps the search by using several variables, such as the painting's subject category (landscape, portrait, and still life) and artist's name. The final choice is previewed along with pricing. Once selected, a barcode receipt is printed and taken to the Gallery shop for payment.

A shop clerk scans the barcode, which launches an automatic workflow solution, managing print queue, payment, billing and, of course, printing. The system does not require the museum staff to be technical experts and, beyond their retail duties, staff only has to reload consumables, such as ink cartridges and paper media.

Making art more accessible

Previously, only about 5 percent of the National Gallery collection was available as lithographic prints, which meant the museum could only offer the public about 60 different reproductions of its paintings at one time.

"There was no way to mass produce reproductions of every piece in the collection-even a minimum print run of 500 copies per design would result in a stock holding of more than 1.2 million units," estimates Clare Gough, head of Communications and Media at the National Gallery.

With the Print On Demand kiosk, located in the museum's Sainsbury Wing Shop, the number of different works of art has expanded dramatically; and the "Masterpiece" program sells approximately 20 reproductions each day to museum visitors. Each fine-art reproduction requires about 5 minutes to print. Art lovers can also place orders from the National Gallery's website, and the prints will be shipped anywhere in the world. A large-size A2 digital print is priced at 25 [pounds sterling], plus handling costs.

Again, the museum's staff echoed the necessity of accurate color reproduction produced by the HP inkjet printers. Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of the HP Imaging and Printing Group, comments, "For the National Gallery, image quality and accuracy is essential; and it would be hard to find a more demanding customer for HP printing technology."

After working with the National Gallery for more than two years digitizing the fine-art collection and creating the technology infrastructure for the POD system, HP plans to offer it to other museums, galleries, and cultural centers around the world as part of the company's Arts and Science philanthropy program.