Digital BW, The Print

since we're talking about the arches paper here is my
evaluation after working with it for some time now.

good:
great feel, weight and texture, the hefty weight
(250gsm) and stiff construction gets rid of curl and
buckling

i like the slightly warm base, its not concord rag
warm, but is is a natural color, the lack of oba's
soothes my mind-just my own personal hang up

it prints very smoothly with UC inks on a 2200

doesn't flake, so far

i had a profile made by cathy stratton and the color
gamut and accuracy is great, my print moniter match is
very very close (i use a LaCie electron blue iv
calibrated with monaco ez color and sensor)

bad:
way too expensive, but that is a problem with many
higher end papers

my quad b&w printing with MIS VM is inconsistant, my
tones have a notable eggplantish color shift, not
terrible, not what i like either. i just switched to
ultratones and have not tried that yet. for quads i
have had much better luck with hahnemuhle, hawk
mountain and museum digital art papers. (unfortunately
museum flakes too much)

like tyler said, it can build up denstity in the
blacks that appears to sit on the surface of the
paper, it usually doesn't but it can, when it does
there is some bronzing like characteristics, nothing
like ultrachromes on glossy papers but still not
desirable. i am going to try dialing back the ink
coverage a bit on my few troublesome images to see if
that corrects things.

without profiling the paper it can be a little tough
to get right, the arches canned profile is okay but it
is a snick green and it plugs shadows. my custom
profile appears to have fixed this problem. other
profiles like lepp or my own monaco quick profiles or
a random eem profile are a mess (plugged shadows, too
much ink build up)

it also smells bad when it first comes out of the box,
that goes away after a bit though

so sorry if i rambled, just thought i'd share my
experiences with the paper. i use it for color images
i really really like. for quads its not my first
choice by any means. i am going to try the entrada
natural finish paper here shortly and see where that
leads. the price and early reports are encouraging.

john eckenrode 






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