Digital BW, The Print

Ukko,

You know that is a very good point! All of these rc papers look
plastic to me and is one of the very reasons I hated type c prints
after they changed over to that surfce for automated speed reasons in
chemical photography.

Epson used to make, possibly still do make, a paper called Glossy
Paper Photo Weight. I used it for some things on my 10K about 4 years
ago and even with that duller Cf inkset I was able to make the reds
saturate and that was impossible with other media. The thing I liked
about that paper is that it looked just like an air dried fiber print,
glossy but not plastic glossy. I never tried it with monochrome.

There were two problems with it,first was its permanence like you
mentioned, which even Epson agreed was probably poor. Second, was the
fact that it scratched so easily in the printer. Nearly every other
print I did with it on different rolls came up scratched. Epson
finally replaced it all for me with something else.

A year after I forgot all about that paper I went to an Epson seminar
and they had all kinds of prints hanging up and some with that paper
(that they warned was not archival at that time also). I noticed every
single one of those prints had small scratches on them also but apart
from that (which is enough!) those prints looked so nice. That paper
didn't have a ton of ob's in it either like the Premium rc line and
the gloss differential was minimal if I remember correctly.

I keep wondering every year when someone is going to come up with a
very stable paper that doesn't scratch that looks like this. They
never do. It isn't so much that I want to "mimic" an air dried silver
print, it's just that those prints were quite brilliant but easy to
look at and the media made you think of the image and not the surface
it was printed on. I think glossy papers still have a long way to go
before I'll become excited about them for use with pigments.

It could be the rc papers are simply easer to manufacture so that is
what they've settled on for production reasons.

John



Epson Premium Glossy being too glossy and "plastic-like", the Epson
Photo Paper
print is most alike my very old gelatine silver prints. It is a pity
that the
paper is not archival.