Paper Chase - Board Meetings

This Paper Chase is a pot-pourri of topics including a “new” paper from Costco, inkjet boards and some canvas, fresh from Focus. Board inkjet media are the in-vogue material at the moment and following a sample-gathering raid at Focus we have decided to let you in on the secret. For the busy professional they have two advantages. The mechanical stability of the board allows it to be placed directly in a frame without the need to secure it to a backing piece. This means that there is less opportunity to damage a print before it is securely fitted to its frame.

There are a number of laminating solutions for covering the front of an image surface, but those, which rely on a liquid application, always run the risk of the print cockling if it has insufficient mechanical stability. A further advantage of boards is gained for prints intended for sale as limited edition prints in a gallery. These are typically stacked in flip racks for the prospective buyer to rummage through, and are quite vulnerable, even with a window mount on the front. The additional mechanical strength of a board can only help.

Most of the boards are existing inkjet media “converted” by bonding to a high-grade stock. Many are both museum grade on the surface and the backing board, thus creating an archival specification media. Boards are mainly 1.3 or 1.2mm in thickness so that they can be fed through the common inkjet printers. Feeding boards can be a little tricky because of the additional thickness, be sure that you check, before you purchase, that they will feed in your own machine. The Epson 2100, 4000, 7600 and 9600 printer all take 1.2mm, the R800 and the new R1800 do not.

Cost

The additional processing of boards naturally increases their cost over the paper equivalent. Price comparisons are difficult to make because of the difference in sizes, boxed quantities and so on. To overcome this we have assembled the table below and back-calculated the costs for an equivalent of a 16x 20. You will see variations according to make, supplier, quantity and trade discounts, but the overall message is that while you pay about an extra pound sterling for a media board, it will cost you an extra £1.50 to buy a backing board of similar archival quality and a similar amount for a window mount. You will also need glue to stick the lot together (which opens another can of worms about archival tacking of prints and mounts!). On this basis board inkjet media look like quite a good deal.

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Paper Mill Direct

This is the outlet name for supplying materials converted by the Lake District specialist, James Cropper. Their mills have been making high-grade papers since before the invention of photography, at their Burneside and Cowan Head mills. They are widely regarded as the authority on museum-grade paper and board conversion; indeed they make archival boxes for the Bodlean library and paper for Hansard. A majority of the consumer products on our shelves are, or have been, wrapped in Cropper products.

They make a number of boards and probably the most exciting is the canvas material launched at Focus this year (Canvas Buckram, due out April 05). This overcomes many of the stretching problems associated with the lighter inkjet canvases as well as saving on the cost of a stretcher frame and. if you have it done out, the cost of actually stretching and mounting. Within their Impact and Impart ranges they also supply Gloss and Pearl board (for photographers) and Soft Textured Art and PhotoSmooth High White for fine art use. These were reviewed back in October 04; the board surfaces behave just like their paper counterparts and the colour data are not repeated here.

Canvas Buckram

This is a very fine weave material with a pattern quite unlike any other canvas we have tested to date. It is very much finer than others and the coating is more delicate with no apparent flooding of the coating around the weave of the canvas. This will be an advantage for producing group portraits, as the scale at which subjects’ eyes disappear into the weave will be smaller. From normal viewing distances there seems to be a repeat textile pattern about 1cm in pitch. Within this, the detailed pattern is an interlocked hourglass shape (see the macro image). The base colour is cream and there is no evidence of any optical brighteners in use, either from the UV booth or the spectral power distribution. The brightness is high at 97.5%, suggesting high-quality substrate materials and coatings. The matt surface delivers a slightly lower Dmax and gamut volume than some other canvas materials we have looked at. Metamerism was moderately low at 2.3. Overall this looks to be a very interesting development and we look forward to testing it more thoroughly when production qualities become available. There are, for example, varnishing and coating trials, which might reveal yet further delights. Initial coating trials suggest that this is a water resistant combination with Epson Ultrachrome and DCP Giclée varnish – a very tasty combination indeed! Two coats of DCP gloss varnish pushed the Dmax up to 1.51 with a general increase on sparkle over the whole print.

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The only issue we can see is transport through the printers. The high mechanical strength of the canvas top coat sometimes causes differential shrinkage to warp the board – we had to bend our sample back to shape to be absolutely sure it would run through the 7600. Conversely, the board material may well solve one of the perpetual problems of running canvas through a 2100 printer. The 2100 does not rely on suction to hold the media flat and you often get an annoying smudge of old ink as the very end of the print curls up and the print head clatters into it on the way by – solid board should prevent this problem. The full range of board products from www.papermilldirect.com is listed below, all are highly recomended.

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PAPER CHASE – THE BOARDS

On this page and the one opposite we table the available boards. It was a bit of a trial finding all the sizes and surfaces – they change with the wind and the web catalogues are either incomplete or incomprehensible (sometimes both)! It does seem though that a large number of imperial sizes have appeared to suit the frames on the market. There are many who consider that the ISO/DIN paper aspect ratio does not fit comfortably with your average portrait and the old sizes of 10x8 and 11x14 are welcome additions to the size range. In most catalogues the boards are not a unique finish, they are also available in paper. This being the case, when printing the board equivalent, you can employ your normal profiles, RIP settings etc. However, Epson 4000, 7600 and 9600 owners should ensure that the media thickness is adjusted in the Advanced Dialogue box of the print driver if a paper media is selected. We have found that turning the High Speed off also helps to eliminate any line banding across boards and, in some instances, we had to reduce the Paper Feed Adjustment to eliminate banding in the direction of the feed. We have also found that initial aligning of the board has been difficult, especially if the boards have Paper Chase bowed – this seems to create uneven pressure from one side of the board to the other, causing the it to skew. The two dialogue boxes below show the Paper Configuration [1] and the Paper Thickness, and Feed Speed adjustments [2]; they are part of the Advanced dialogue box.

Also with larger boards, double check that you have sufficient clearance on the entrance and exit side of the printer – we ruined a sheet by allowing it to crash into a box on the floor, thus stopping the board from moving right at the very end; very annoying.

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KIRKLAND Signature0.

One of the more entertaining games that we get to play is guessing the source of inkjet papers. Ilford for example claims to coat more than 50% of the world supply of these papers. Late last year there was an outbreak of speculation as to the provenance of the Costco paper bearing the Kirkland Signature. If you are unfamiliar with Costco, they are an American owned chain with numerous trade outlets in the UK. (You can walk into Costco hungry, thirsty, naked and bereft of any consumer product and leave with the lot at trade prices!). The word on the street was that the paper was a re-badged Ilford product. It seems to have taken a little longer to arrive in the UK but on our last visit there it was on the shelves. At £10.99 for a box of 125 A4 sheets we could not leave it on the shelves. So we rushed home with it, to do a Sherlock Holmes, colour audit.

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The back of the box does say “Made in Switzerland” which was a good start. We profiled the paper using the Ultra chrome Photo Black ink set and then audited the output. This is a fantastic paper at the price; it will stand alongside the best on the market. It is not identical to the boxed, Ilford product but is so close that any workflow (profiles, RIP settings, etc) will reproduce so closely that you will only tell the difference with calibrated spectros! The Kirkland has a near identical spectral power distribution but a slightly higher optical brightener content (OBA) which renders it slightly cooler. The Dmax is a commendable 2.13 and, in common with our American cousins, we found no evidence of bronzing with the profile we built using the new X-Rite Pulse system. We seemed to be just on the cusp however, as the final shadow patch was just a fraction lighter than the previous patch. The greyscale linearity was good down to about 25 RGB points, where it bottomed out then climbed up again (by about 0.01 Dmax points). Some profile tweaking would probably improve this. Like other resin-coated papers the metamerism in the mid tone grey (D65 to Tungsten at 50% brightness) was slightly elevated when compared to a matt fine art paper.

The coolness of the paper degraded the skin tones more than an equivalent fine art paper, the additional blueness dragging down the saturation. The opposite effect was seen on the landscape tones, which were very accurate, helped by the availability of the deeper maximum tones.

“…I have been doing some independent research on the Kirkland paper source. I believe what I have learned to be accurate and my sources, who wish to remain anonymous, I believe are quite reliable.

The Kirkland Professional Glossy paper is manufactured in Switzerland by Ilford on a special contract formulated basis. It is a very high volume seller and there are no plans to put it out in larger sizes any time soon. Ilford does contract paper formulations for other chains in the USA and they all seem to have a different tweak to them…For those of you who have been curious about this Costco/Kirkland paper situation I hope this post is of some value…”

posting from the Yahoo Digital Black and White Forum January 05

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The SWPP 2008 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 193 days to get ready for the 2009 convention - which starts on January 14, 2009

Photo Quote: It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators. - Ansel Adams