Paper Chase - Fuji Film - Baryte Canvas HD and Museum Soft Papers

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Since they became involved with inkjet printing FujiFilm have sourced high-quality papers and sold them under their own brand name at competitive prices. Additionally, simple things like the provision of 300-piece boxes of A4 have led to them building a strong following amongst professional photographers.

Their latest swatch book contains six Photo papers, eight Fine Art papers (& canvases), four Matt papers and five specialist materials such as backlit and banner materials. We concentrate in this review on the three new papers in their range.

In the front of the swatch book is a mini-CD with a set of profiles for Epson 2400, 4000, 4800, 7600, 7800, 9600 and 9800 printers. They are built for 1440dpi resolutions with advice that they may be used at other resolutions – not strictly true as all these printers vary their inking level at different resolutions. Certainly in use, the provided profiles did not perform particularly well and we elected to build our own.

RIGHT: The Oxford Twill weave has been used again in the HD Canvas variant.

Fine Art Museum Baryte Paper

This is yet another addition to the ‘fibre-based silver halide look-alike’ media that have sprung up, and it shows all the characteristics of the breed; high Dmax, very low overall errors and quite exceptional skin tone accuracies. Its name harks back to baryte (barium sulphate, sometimes barite, one of 49 synonyms which includes Tiff!) a material used in the surfacing of traditional halide papers. Such are the subtle differences in batches of materials that this one topped the pole on gamut volume and also displayed the lowest error reading in the class. However, the overall ‘signature’ of the errors was much in accord with the other variants we have tested with Epson UltraChrome inks, using the Photo Black ink set. Our data were derived from an Epson 4800. The gamut volume was 830,985, the Dmax was 2.28 and the Macbeth errors averaged 4.4ΔE Lab/2.54 ΔE2000. The skin tones had an average error of 1.2ΔE Lab/1.5ΔE2000.

We had the opportunity to make an exhibition-quality print with the test remnant of the paper and very impressive it was; this paper remains a firm favourite around these parts!

High Density White Cotton Canvas

The 340gsm Fuji Artist Canvas has always been an excellent media and performed well in our extensive canvas review some time back. It has now been joined by its bigger and brighter brother, the 400gsm High Density Cotton Canvas. In response to demands from photographers for a brighter finish, the material coating is loaded with OBAs which produces a noticeable lift in the whiteness of the base as well as a slight cooling. The substrate is also changed, the newer is slightly more buff coloured, although the twin-weave Oxford Twill is retained. The 400gsm has a 54 micron calliper. The gamut of the HD measured 6% higher than the Artist Canvas although the test conditions were not the same. As shown in the gamut visualisation, the HD media delivers more vibrant yellows, reds, cyans and greens and the data would have lifted this material into second place in our 2004 tests. This is in spite of the HD delivering a slightly reduced Dmax in our tests.

Plotting the spectral power distributions of the base coatings, puts the HD in the same bracket as the DCP Canvas and the Ilford Studio Canvas from the 2004 tests – that is a lift to about 107% brightness at 440nm. Plotting the 27-month-old, Artist Canvas along with HD, placed the older material exactly where it was (implying that no dark-storage deterioration had taken place). The HD was placed about 5 points blue, to lie in between the DCP and Ilford materials. For the record we have reproduced all the data.

Below: HD Canvas lies between DCP and Ilford in coolness.

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