What is a Giclée?
Giclée (JHEE - CLAY)
The French word Giclée describes a technique of spraying. Industry-wide, it has become the printer's definition for quality; archival fine art produced by digital print technology.

What is a Giclée PrintMakerFA?
ColorSpan introduced the Giclée PrintMakerFA in 1998 especially for the fine art Giclée market. It is the first printer developed specially for the fine art market. The Giclée PrintMakerFA uses eight 600 dpi Hewlett-Packard print heads to produce prints with an effective print resolution of 1800 dpi. ColorSpan also designed the Giclée PrintMakerFA with an adjustable head height to accommodate a wider variety of media and the print head assembly contains a CCD camera which is used to analyze printhead quality and align the eight print heads.

The Giclée PrintMakerFA lets you print on virtually any media that can be wrapped around the drum:
Fine Art Canvas · Watercolour Paper · Glossy Photobase · Satin Photobase · Back lit Film · Proofing Paper and Other Non-Absorbent Material.

An adjustable printhead height creates a world of versatility for your fine art reproduction

• Allows custom head height settings.
• Automatically calibrates to synchronized ink and media settings.
• Motorized assembly manoeuvres printhead with pin-point accuracy.
• Manoeuvres printhead with digital accuracy.
• Accepts a variety of media up to 120 mil in thickness.
  

Achieve gallery quality through 8-printhead technology

• Creates continuous-tone image quality at an apparent 1800-dpi.
• Adds light and medium cyan and magenta inks to the typical CMYK.
• Produces incredible detail and texture in the highlights, mid tones and shadows.
• Uses Endura·Chrome LightFast Ink for the broad gamut of dye ink combined with the durability of pigmented ink.

Background

Perfecting Giclée printmaking is a never-ending process with inks, media and software continuously being improved. A Giclée is recognized as a collectible category of fine art.Giclée is a very exciting method of printmaking. In fact in the US alone over the last six years the Giclée method has grown from relative obscurity to over fifty percent of all fine art reproduction. Do they stand the test of time? Third party tests (Wilhem Research) show a longevity range of 75 - 80 years before noticeable fading occurs on Arches cold press paper.