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Giclée, pronounced 'Jee-clay' is the buzz word for the new printing process that is being touted as much better for the making of fine art images.

Seldom is the word "Reproduction" used in the promotional material of this process. Some of the phrases are without doubt, meant to raise the Giclée to the level of fine art, which of course is false.

Some of the hype phrases are:

Giclées are being embraced by dozens of museums around the world including New York's Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and many more.

The Giclée process produces one of the highest quality fine art prints available.

Providing fine artists, photographers, computer artists and museum administrators with the finest museum archival prints on superior materials.

The phrases being used are as misleading as those used 10 and 20 years ago by the photomechanical reproduction promoters. The reproduction business reached a feaverish pitch early 1990's when the "time limited editions" were introduced. This caught people by surprise, when at the end of the time period, the presold edition ended up being upward to 70,000 prints. It was the beginning of the end. An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, April 30 1994, helped to seal the fate, when it quoting a Toronto art dealer, "It's one of the worst scams of all". It was shortly after, that the market crumbled, and many Art Print stores went the way of the passenger pigeon....extinct.

What goes around comes around and to-day we might be seeing the resurgence of the reproduction market with this new technology. Giclée, a French word that means 'to squirt", is produced on an Iris Printer which is an ink jet printer, (there are many small versions of these ink jet printers that can be found in offices and homes world wide). These printers are equipped to handle images that are good facsimiles of the original art they mimic. The producers state that the material printed on substrate, (which the Webster defines as, "the base on which an organism lives"), range from 100% rag paper, watercolour paper, canvas, mylar, translite. This is possible, because the ink application is from nozzles, squirting a million droplets of ink per second. These are the size of a human red blood cell, and are sprayed on at a resolution of 1800 dpi. The resulting print has no perceptible dot pattern, looking like the continuous tone of a photograph. The latest findings give the fade life of these are about 25 years under normal room lighting. Compared to coloured hand made original prints that are upward to 200 to 400 years old, and original art work that lasts upward to a 1000 + years, there is no contest.

This new technology produces the most spectacular imaging results, but is in reality, simply mechanically applied ink on paper, and these reproductions are not in any way a Fine Art Print. This phrase is reserved for the images that are made by the Artist hand.

Original fine art prints are made by artists and when buying anything else, be prudent about the price you pay. I can take a scanned digitized image or an original painting and get the first large size Giclée Print for $20.00 per square foot. The cost of framing is added and this could range from $150.00 for a standard frame to $400.00 for a elaborate unit. It is hard to justify how the cost of some of these Giclée images are being sold when framed at $1500.00 to $4000.00 and even higher. There are numerous hand made prints and original art that are equal or lower priced, that one should consider, which gives you the advantage of value growth images and are considered investment art.

Beware and be informed, the Giclée is sophisticated imagery, generated with computers or digitally scanned technology, yet remains a Poster and/or Decorative Art. This is a large industry producing interesting Commercial images, contributing to our visual needs of matching our curtains, rug colour schemes and other personal wants and needs. The bottom line is that the Giclée Reproductions fall short of being a "Fine Art Print". This phrase is reserved for the prints made by the Artists hand