Digital BW, The Print

Tom,

Your impressions are most welcome. With little or no opportunity to 
see the real thing we have to rely on verbal evaluations of the 
materials.

I am running the same inks and printer, and I am finding the Eclipse 
Satine with a "n" neutral curve Paul did for me or the "mw" the most 
pleasing. AS Paul notes, the Satine does not have the deepest black 
but I really like the brightness and color of the base, the texture, 
and especially, to my eye, the neutral appearance of the inks on the 
paper.

EAM has really nice tonality and great blacks but I have come to not 
like the base color, which I find to be slightly greenish. Museo is a 
wonderful paper but too warm for my tastes for the majority of my 
work. You might like the Hahnemule Photo Rag, which is in between 
Museo and Eclipse Satine in brightness and warmth and is smoother 
than either.

Where did you get the SFA? Was it already cut down or are you cutting 
it from sheets or rolls yourself?

Martin Wesley


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Tom Keesling" 
<tom.keesling@a...> wrote:
> I'm still very new to both BW printing and the MIS VM inks, but I 
> thought I'd share what I found this morning when printing a photo 
> restoration image on various papers in WIN98SE on a 1280 printer.
> 
> I've never used EAM, so I probably steepened my learning curve 
> somewhat, but I'm making some progress. I don't know enough to give 
> much more than a general observation, but maybe that'll be helpful.
> 
> I'm printing a 1904 8x10 image that I scanned from a very good 
grade 
> of newsprint (vintage 1976), so print quality expectations were 
never 
> very high. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of 
the 
> prints. 
> 
> I printed the image on Museo (250gsm), Epson SFA (425gsm), and 
> Brightcube Eclipse Satine 190 papers. I used the VMP8-MW8.acv curve 
> for all three prints and viewed them under an Ott-lite.
> 
> My least favorite of the three was the Eclipse Satine. Although I 
> like the paper (in part because it's quite a bit whiter than the 
> others), the blacks didn't look as deep as on the other two. Could 
> this be because of the combination of this warm curve and this 
bright 
> white paper? This paper did seem to show just a little more detail, 
> however. 
> 
> The Museo paper I think is just a little whiter than the Epson SFA, 
> but they're very close. The Museo image is a little sharper than 
the 
> SFA image, but not by much at all and the sky is less mottled 
(better 
> looking) in the Museo print.
> 
> Overall, the Museo print is the best of the three in this instance.
> I like all three papers and will continue to experiment with all 
> three. I've got plenty of Museo and Epson SFA to experiment with 
and 
> will order the Eclipse Satine when they get it stocked again. 
> 
> I hope this is helpful...
> 
> Tom Keesling
> Intelligent Design, Inc.