Photography

The last show I went to displayed dye transfer prints. About as high end as you can get.

For a relatively short period of time there was a print lab in London that printed the equivalent of a 4000 dpi ink print at very reasonable price. Went out of business a few years ago. The prints were gorgeous.

Method? Most likely Giclee printing, on a heavyweight conservation grade paper such as Baryta or Somerset Velvet.

It gets quite pricey at larger sizes, so much so that we ended up buying a couple of large format Epson Giclee printers that take 42" wide rolls of paper as it worked out cheaper in the long run than using a lab. Also meant that we can run our own in house calibration to ensure perfect colour consistency.

All of my own stuff I have printed are digital chromogenic prints (digital images exposed onto negative photographic paper with lasers, the paper is then developed in chemicals; also sometimes called silver halide prints). The image quality is great and the printing is cheap. I use Bay Photo. I also do some black and white darkroom printing, but i'm not very good and I can do way more in Photoshop than in the darkroom. I do not sell prints, they are for display in my own home and so I don't really care about archival life because I have the digital files. I personally am a big fan of Fuji deep matte velvet paper, but the best paper to use depends on the photo.

I believe most photographers selling prints these days are selling inkjet prints (also called giclee prints). Inkjets have the potential to be higher quality than c prints, but that quality varies depending on the ink, paper and printer used. The archival life of inkjet prints, especially those made with pigment inks, is almost certainly longer than c prints although the actual limits are theoretical because they haven't been around long enough to actually test those limits in the real world. Inkjet prints range from slightly more expensive to waaayyyyy more expensive than c prints to produce, especially once you start using really high end paper.

In the past, the highest possible quality of print was a positive to positive chromogenic print (using a darkroom enlarger to print a slide), but as far as I know there are no more positive papers being produced. The archival life of positive papers was greater than negative paper, but I don't know how it compares to pigment ink.