Here is Nicholas Hellmuth (at the right) with images being tested on the Durst Rho 800 Presto in the factory demo room in Lienz, Austria during a one-week inspection of the Durst facilities there and in adjacent Brixen, Italy. The panoramic images are test shots using the BetterLight Pano/WideView; the image of the banana flower were photographed with a Phase One P25. The reviews that result from this testing and evaluations contribute towards creating the FLAAR Reports.

Over one million people a year read all the sites in the FLAAR network (there are individual sites with over a million hits in a single month from over 20,000 individual readers, per month; another 20,000+ the next month). But the valid count is visitors, not hits. Our site on UV and solvent printers was read by more than 411,000 people around the world during 2009. The FLAAR site on digital-photography is read by over 340,000 people a year, and more on other FLAAR sites (on water-based printers).

Take a virtual tour through our BGSU lab.

The FLAAR information network consists of about six web sites with over 900 pages of informative content. We have information in three languages read in over 62 countries worldwide.

The 30 reports on digital photography were originally prepared for the participants in our training programs at the University of Malta (yes, the island south of Sicily and north of Tunisia). Each of these programs has been finished, so we make the updated Learning Units available to our readers (they do not have to be enrolled in any university).

1.Introduction to serious digital photography
2. Introduction to professional panorama photography
3.Digital Photography as Input for Wide Format Inkjet Printing.

This site is brought to you by:

FLAAR, a non-profit research institute dedicated for over three decades to improving the quality of photography in the museum and university environment. FLAAR has evolved from that previous position to encompassing digital photography and wide format inkjet printing since 1996. Today, with 28 wide format printers having passed through our in-house facilities, FLAAR is the de facto world leader as an independent information source on digital imaging. FLAAR was in existence long before wide format inkjet printing or digital photography even existed. That makes it possible to remain as a reliable outside source of useful product reviews.

And, now in 2010, FLAAR is adding evaluations of 3D portable scanning equipment as well as evaluating 3D rapid prototypers (especially those that use inkjet printheads from Canon, HP, and Ricoh).

More than 59,000 companies and individuals have downloaded the FLAAR reports in PDF format in order to figure out what hardware and software to purchase based on reviews, evaluations, and experiences of Nicholas Hellmuth and his team (of 17 people and growing).

In late 2009 FLAAR acquired an HP Z3200 for an internal evaluation. This printer would be located at FLAAR main office in Guatemala city. There are ready two initial reports of this printer plus several others from the previous model HP Z3100.	HP Z3200 after setup and installation, printing some FLAAR samples. The snake photographs were taken by FLAAR photographer Jaime Leonardo at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (National Museum of Natural History) in 2009.
Printers arrived for evaluation in our university lab from Canon, Epson, ColorSpan, Mimaki, HP. We also evaluate scanners and digital cameras. FLAAR was located at Bowling Green State University (of Ohio) for seven years. By 2008 funding by the State of Ohio was decreasing every year so we have moved back to St Louis (where FLAAR was headquartered before moving to Ohio). The advantage of being in St Louis is that here there are more printshops with UV and solvent printers. We were at BGSU during the era of water-based printers.	But today, in 2010, the larger solvent and UV printers are not realistic to bring onto a university campus (the printers are too large and ventilation is not realistic in a campus building). Also, we do most of our evaluations of UV and solvent printers in the factories where they are manufactured so that we can see inside the printers and test them personally in the demo rooms. So it helps to be in a larger city with more printshops to inspect and with an airport so we can reach the different manufacturing sites. In Ohio it was a three-hour drive just to get back and forth to an airport to fly to the manufacturing sites in Europe, Canada, Korea, China, Taiwan, and across the US. The senior research editor logged over 400,000 km in 2007 inspecting wide-format inkjet printers. That is more than a quarter of a million miles in a single year, to take notes to add to the FLAAR Reports in order to bring our readers additional information. Today, in 2010, Dr Hellmuth has already been inspecting printers in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and New Delhi, India. Our reach is international.
View inside the original FLAAR facilities for evaluations of large format inkjet printers at Francisco Marroquin University. We grew so large we have incorporated our institute as a separate non-profit institute and have opened a larger office off campus. We are interested in opening a facility in Europe, but it is a challenge to find a European university with space as well as an interest in wide format inkjet printers and advanced digital imaging.	FLAAR has more printers available for comparative evaluation than any other institute in the country: Canon, ColorSpan, Epson, Encad, HP, Mimaki, and Iris giclee printer. Hence you can trust that our reviewers can provide insights not available elsewhere.