Giclée Prints

A Giclée (zhee-CLAY), is an individually produced, high-resolution, high-fidelity, high tech reproduction done on a special large format printer. Giclees are produced from digital scans of existing artwork. The word “giclée”, as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade resistant "archival" inks and the printers that use them.

The word "giclée" dates back to 1989 and is a french term roughly meaning "spray or squirt" which refers to the digital printing process. During printing, millions of microscopic droplets of ink per second are applied to the print media. The best giclee printers provide 1,800 dpi resolution and blend as many as eight colors of ink.

Giclée have evolved into the new darlings of the art world. They are coveted by collectors for their fidelity and quality, and desired by galleries and artists alike because they don't have to be produced in huge quantities with their large layout of capital and storage.

A giclee is a high-end fine art print recognized as "the next best thing to owning the original, or in the case of certain art created by digital artists, each giclee is an "original". Giclee's can be found on display in the world's finest museums and art galleries, often they can be hard to distinguish from originals.

Giclée style prints are much more expensive on a “per print” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process original used to make such reproductions. A large Giclée can cost over $50 per print not including scanning and color correction as opposed to $5 per print for a four color offset litho of the same image printed in a run of 1000. Giclée style printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color, the substrate printed on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the printer itself. Because of this, Giclée style prints can technically be called “prints”, i.e. an image where the artist has a hand in actual production.