Digital BW, The Print

Well hell, I've used Photorag continuously for 12 years and I haven't experienced any of the issues you guys are talking about. It has always been a sure thing for me. I used it tonight like every other night with perfect results all around. I must have done a million prints on it. Lots of limited edition portfolios for years and years and I had less issues on Photorag 308 than anything else. Over and over.

It is also all over the world in the Canon and Hp forms, which are their major papers for this surface.

But if you want to  make something else the defacto smooth rag paper tell me what it is. What is your suggestion? Please not Innova for God's sake, and the Crane Portfolio Rag is beautiful but my cleints call it "warm" and the dmax is mediocre at best. 

Tell me what your standard is now and I'll start using it. Canson? Is that what it is now. How is their quality control panning out. Is it affordable?

Besides that, lets take a close look at those William Turner sample results that are in test now and see how that goes. No oba there. But that is never going to be a standard monochrome paper for most people. I love it, but it is just not going to be a universal photo surface.

John




--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Walker Blackwell <forums@...> wrote:
>
> Ok everybody. Here is what I would suggest. Mark needs about 25 new  
> members/test. To me, this is a very steep business curve (not that I'm  
> an expert only owning a very small business of my own). So I would  
> suggest to all the professional photographers, professors, students,  
> and everyone else to get the word out that there's a new testing  
> facility in town and that it needs our/your support to get running  
> good. If we can gather a community around it, than maybe we can  
> strengthen our own profession/work as a whole and further the cause of  
> what we do. That includes creating a print-process archive (a side- 
> note of Mark's in an earlier post.)
> 
> I agree with Tyler on HPR. I've lost thousands of dollars in both  
> direct HPR costs (ie: paper going bad and not recouped by Hahnemuhle)  
> and probably tens of thousands more (it's too painful to even do the  
> accounting on this) in lost print-jobs because of yellowing problems  
> in Chicago *not in lab where we have air purifiers, but out-of-lab.
> 
> HPR has the best dMax and least flaking and drag-line (ie: Innova  
> Cotton Rag) issues of any Cotton rag paper out there with Piezography  
> inks on matte paper. That's why I use it. But it has so many  
> permanence problems that I vote to focus on some other more stable  
> paper. Maybe at this point in this forum and a few others we can start  
> to make our voices heard and look for another standard. HPR has been  
> around for a long time and it has had as many problems for a long  
> time. While its surface quality control is great (everyone here as  
> probably seen the fish-scaling of Moab duo and Innova SC in the shadow  
> tones on some paper batches am I right?) I no longer recommend it for  
> serious archival work because I've been burned too many times. While  
> ink-fade and shift is a really critical part of the equation, the more  
> immediate problems I face as a digital print-maker are paper surface  
> degradation problems. These things crop up in a few weeks to a few  
> years and are absolutely devastating to both our profession and our  
> clients. I understand this is a whole other world of science, but I  
> would like to see a paper that starts off stable. I guess I would be  
> ok with HPR though if the majority agreed we should use that as a  
> standard base for ink tests. I guess it's more about the inks than the  
> paper and HPR seems dependable as far as fade results are concerned.  
> In my opinion, it's just not a dependable paper-base outside of ink  
> stability.
> 
> Walker
>