Very timely thread for me too! I'm about to buy a r2880. I have a dumb question . . . Of the papers listed above, which use matte profiles and which are glossy?
My printing will be mostly B&w.
Ilford Smooth Pearl & GFS
Red River (good inexpensive everyday papers)
Epson VFA
Hahn. FA Pearl and many others.
Ilford Gold Fibre Silk
Epson luster
Velvet fine art
Innova Photo Smooth Cotton
jrrhodes wrote:
Very timely thread for me too! I'm about to buy a r2880. I have a dumb question . . . Of the papers listed above, which use matte profiles and which are glossy?
My printing will be mostly B&w.
Ilford Smooth Pearl & GFS - Glossy
Red River (good inexpensive everyday papers) - They make both.
Epson VFA - Matte
Hahn. FA Pearl and many others. - They make both. FA Pearl is glossy
Ilford Gold Fibre Silk - Glossy
Epson luster - Glossy
Velvet fine art - Matte
Innova Photo Smooth Cotton - don't know this one but would suspect it's matte.
I use Epson Premium Semi-gloss. I never hear it mentioned in these kinds of threads, but when I first got my Epson printer (2200) I could not tell the difference between the Premium Semi-gloss and the Luster. Current price per sheet at B&H is $0.50 for both papers. You can get Semi-gloss in packs of 20 and packs of Luster in 50 and 250 in the 8 ½ x 11 size.
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Gary
Will Fly for Food... and more Nikon stuff
I use matte for its ability to show the image at any angle in any light, instead of most gloss paper which will pick up a shine in some lighting situations. Behind glass, on the wall at viewing distance I haven't found anything that looks better than Epson Ultra Premium Presentation Matte, which is among the cheapest papers. I love the feel of Hahnemuhle photo rag, etc but once its on the wall at viewing distance, that feel goes away and I'm left with an empty wallet.
The paper I use the most of is VFA for Epson. It's the least expensive of the fine art papers and is actually very nice overall. I've been printing a fair amount of hotel jobs this year where they want both rock bottom price and a fine art looking paper and this is the only way to go for that.
I also get a fair amount of requests for Luster paper but absolutely hate the Epson Premium Luster. Not only is it too thin for really large prints, it's too "lustery" for my tastes, and worst of all, it has this sort of grayed down bluish base color that is just plain weird. Other than that I love it.
I just got cold called from Lexjet and they sent me their version of Luster. Interestingly enough, it has a cleaner non bluish white which measures just slightly brighter and it profiles almost identically to the Epson. You could for all intents and purposes interchange the profiles and never know. However, the Lexjet sales rep swore up and down that this was a 300 gram paper as opposed to Epson's 260 gram luster, and upon measuring it with a micrometer, the Epson Luster mic'd out at .279 mm while the Lexjet was actually thinner at .269mm. I've emailed the rep with no response so far.
Other than those I love Hahnemühle FAP and Photo Rag and like Crane Museo Silver Rag for black and white but not for color.
For those using older printers, and this includes the equivalent of the 9800 and earlier of Epson, I found that the Hahn FAP actually prints better color images with noticeably blacker blacks when using matte ink. On my 9800, the "L" value for a max black dropped from a fairly anemic 13-14 down to about 9-10 using the matte ink. The caveats are that you must use a custom profile, Advanced Black and White will NOT give neutral prints, and you need to spray your prints for black gloss differential. The same paper on my 9900 with PK ink gives a black "L" value of around 8, which is darker than anything I could get from the 9800.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Harmon FB Baryta. This is got to be the closest to true photographic paper out there. The other thing, is that it shows much more detail than other prints. Comparing something like Ilford Pearl to this is mind boggling how much more detail comes out in the print.
It even smells like photo paper. And it is available in 17x25! (Why doesn't epson offer this side ?)
There are too many papers out there to be able to test and use them all. I have no doubt that there are quite a few papers out there that I will love once I get around to testing them. For me, it's often a matter of having a good paper that works and comes in at a decent price point, and being able to get enough of it at one time to complete a job.
As far as detail goes, I've started doing some testing on the 9900 and using a gloss transparent media, that printer, using a target designed by my good friend Bill Glickman, rendered an incredible 9-10 line pairs per millimeter on the paper printing 2880 with finest detail and a base file resolution over 1440 ppi. The most amazing thing is that I kept seeing an increase in detail up to and including 1440 dpi on the target file. That's sharp, and it somewhat counters that we've been told that anything over 360 dpi in the file would not make a difference on print. Of course not all media can hold the same detail. I'll be doing some more testing when time frees up again.
Pictorico High Gloss film. I love this stuff. Also the Ilford High Gloss Film. Probably has something to do with hand printing ilfochrome for 15 years.
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