Paper Chase - Impart Image Impact

This issue, Paper Chase moves to the English Lake District to review a product line from the old established firm of James Cropper.They have taken their existing knowledge of fine board making and applied modern coatings for ink jet use.With the brand names Impart, Impact and Image, many of the finishes are available as 1.3mm board, providing a bonus for the busy studio as they can be inserted straight into the frame without further finishing operations.

PAPERMILLDIRECT is a new online purchasing organisation selling the media from James Cropper plc from the English Lake District. (see call out box). Croppers have a long standing tradition in paper conversion and have always had a considerable expertise in board making .They have now combined this skill to provide an range of papers and boards for the Giclée, photography and enthusiast markets. It was the board, which was initially brought to our attention, but here we look at both the Giclée and photography products. The board is coated with the identical finish to the paper products but bulked up to 1.3mm thickness. This has huge workflow advantages for the busy professional, as the image can be place directly into the frame. The range is sold under the names Impart, Image and Impact with target markets of fine art, professional photography and enthusiast respectively. The Impact range has the same quality of coating but onto generally thinner substrates. We chose to review only the Impart and Image ranges.

Impart - the giclée range

For the initial trials, profiles were not available for the Epson Ultrachrome ink set for the 2100, 4000, 7600 or 9600 using either Matte or photo Blacks. For this reason we picked a profile from our files for a paper we felt was the most similar - a fine art, lightly textured 100% cotton rag without optical brighteners. With luck (or was it skill?) we found a near perfect match. The moral is that if you are already running prints with this type of media you can retain the same setting and profiles with a reasonable degree of confidence.

Colormetric data on the two giclée materials was close enough to be called identical. The average colour errors across the gamut were about 6 Lab Delta E. The borrowed profile mapped the neutrals to the same base paper tone and so everything looked fine and dandy. The metameric index for both materials was low at 2.2 (Lab Delta E; D65 to Tungsten on the mid grey). The colour audit was carried out after 1 hour and 24 hours. The paper did dry down by a very tiny amount but not enough for the eye to detect (2/100ths of a percentage point over the gamut). In practice the print is dry as it leaves the printer.

Impart Soft Textured Art - 315gsm and 1.3mm

This is a cream finish, very slightly textured, typical of a mould made media. It is 100% cotton rag, finished to archival standards and complying with Fine Art Trade Guild requirements. The high reflectance is achieved through the use of premium products in the manufacture and does not rely on optical brighteners. There was absolutely no lift in the spectral trace at the blue wavelengths and the paper was totally inert in ultraviolet light (see image). The coating held a maximum black of a little over 19%, good for this class of product. Differentiation of the deep blacks was maintained down to 15 RGB points, again good for this class of product as they sometimes clog the shadows. The sideways spread of the ink (dot gain in prepress terminology) was enough to almost eradicate the printer head pattern but not enough to deteriorate the fine detail in text. The grey scale linearity was good with a smooth transition into the maximum density of 1.55 (Dmax) - again typical of this class of product. The colour accuracy using the "off the shelf" profile was good, it lay in the upper error band of the bespoke profiled data on our data base and would probably improve with a bespoke profile. The light flesh tones were very accurate, slightly desaturated in the richer flesh tones and slightly rotated towards yellow in the very pale flesh tones. The average flesh tone error was 2.1 DE2000 and the error in the Macbeth Light Flesh tone was a minuscule 0.7 units. As with all the "cream" base tone fine art materials, these flesh tones are extremely accurate.

Impart PhotoSmooth High White Cotton

Paper chase This paper has a slight lift in its spectral trace in the blue region. It is the closest to neutral of all the range although it was not totally inert to uv light. Its overall colorimetric data was so close to its sibling, Soft Texture Art, that they can be regarded as identical.

As the name implies, this is a smoother, more calendered finish and the lack of surface undulations displays finest detail slightly better. It might therefore be regarded as being more suitable for the reproduction of photographs as fine art. In truth you can take your choice on aesthetics alone!

Giclée Varnishing

We gave both the Impart materials a coat of DCP Giclée varnish and discovered quite a difference. As expected the Dmax was raised. However the Soft Textured Art media deepened to a greater extent reaching a Dmax of 1.94 compared to 1.75 for the Photo Smooth. In addition there was some drag out of the pigment from the Photo Smooth, smearing a dark tone onto the surrounding border. It might be possible to prevent this with a quick sizing coat of varnish using a roller but time did not allow this experiment. For the present it seems that water based varnish is only possible on the Soft Textured Art media.

One other slight problem we had was there was some dust and fibres on the surface which blocked the ink spray and then fell off to leave a “hole” in the image.This is quite normal with the thicker board materials where there is a lot more cutting dust/fibres and you are advised to brush down the board with a clean brush before you print.

The Image Range

Paper chase Papermilldirect have set up a web site with profiles for many of the current desktop printers. This does not yet include the Epson 4000, 7600 or 9600 range and profiles are only available for the Image range on the 2100 printer. These were not fully functional at the time of compiling this review and so we bespoke profiled the Image Photo Gloss.

Photo Gloss 270gsm & 1.3mm Board

This board material is of some interest to members as it enables a print to be placed directly into the mount without further work.Note however that at present only DIN sizes are available rather than the imperial sizes favoured by the frame manufacturers.

The base tone of this paper is a few Lab points blue.There is less evidence of optical brightening agents than the Pearl finish and different profiles would be needed for the two variants. After making a bespoke profile with the 270gsm paper we loaded the 1.3mm board into the 2100. Remember that you have to use the Matte Board Loader and the Envelope setting on the 2100.We used the Photo Black ink variant for our tests.

Paper Chase It was not possible to pass the colour audit target through our spectro and so only spot readings could be taken. However here are our comments. The gamut of the paper/ink combination was the highest that we have measured to date (863,000 compared to an average of 450,000 for art papers and a high of 737,000 for other gloss papers). In particular the yellow, cyan and green parts of the gamut were strong. The black density was moderately high at 9% Brightness (Dmax 1.99).The profile mapped the greys onto the base white giving a cool and quite vibrant look to the print. Metamerism was a little high at 3.7 Delta e (Lab D65 to Tungsten on 50% grey).This could have been due to the strong presence of yellow in the gamut. In tungsten light the greys were warm, in D65 and natural daylight they looked absolutely neutral. The important Caucasian skin tone error was moderately low at 4.5 Lab.

The overall impression of the print was of a slightly cool, bright and crisp look.There may have been some problems transporting the 1.3mm board because the first swatches were a little streaked, a fault that was not present further down the print.

The image surface was quite soft and easily marked but the print was essentially dry to the touch as it came out of the printer. There was an insignificant lift of 0.3% in the lightness of the print over the first 50 minutes of drying

Paper Chase

Paper chase

The SWPP 2008 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 191 days to get ready for the 2009 convention - which starts on January 14, 2009

Photo Quote: When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. - Ansel Adams