What is your favorite Fine Art / Rag paper?

shadowfox

shadowfox

Darkroom printing lives
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Digital B&W printers, school me on this.

I just picked up a Canon Pixma 9500 Mark II.
This is a pigment ink which is duller than dye on glossy paper which suits me *perfectly* (I hated glossy prints with a passion :) ).

With that context, what's your favorite paper type and brand?
Legion? Canson? Museo? Hahnemuhle? Moab? .... etc.
 
Hahnemuhle's William Turner paper, very nice structure solid thickness and it gives the ink its true character.
 
On Epson printers, I have found that none of the non-Epson made matte or rag papers produced the image quality of the Epson papers. All I tried had weak blacks. Epson's Velvet Fine Art is the best, rich deep blacks, gorgeous for black and white with Epson's pigment ink printers.

I don't know about Canon, but you might try the Epson Velvet to see if it works well with Canon's pigment ink.
 
On 9500 (1st gen) Hahnemuhle's Photo Rag Pearl.

I believe that you can still order Hahnemuhle's trial assortment of papers.
 
hlockwood said:
From Hahn Photo Rag to Entrada FANat to, now, Canson Rag Photographique.

Harry
Click to expand...

I have used Canson watercolor paper for doing alt. printing and those are some high quality paper.
I am quite impressed with the content of Canson Infinity (their website for inkjet papers).

They also seem to sponsor photographer exhibitions.
 
My new favorite paper is the Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag. This 100% cotton paper has great weight and texture in addition it contains no optical bighteners. The paper has a slightly warm tone and a semi-gloss finish which truly shines with monochrome printing . Try the 10 pack trial size to see if you like it.
 
I like Museo II (mat) and Ilford Gold Fiber Gloss (semi-gloss, fiber texture). I've recently discovered "Office Depot Professional Photo Paper Mat" ...ultra cheap, very fine if what you want is maximum zip...seems identical to Moab Kayenta. I wouldn't deliver it to a client because Office Depot is more honest than most so doesn't claim "archival."

A reasonably well operated Epson will blow away any Canon in terms of black etc, and it will use a much wider range of paper. For B&W Epson's ABW driver (standard with mid/larger printers) is amazing.
 
Having worked with several papers, I've found that I really like Epson's Hot Press Natural. It comes as a bit of a surprise as I never cared for matte papers throughout 20 odd years of wet printing.
 
Motherlode

Motherlode

Yesterday I hit the jackpot, so to speak.
I saw a weird short ad on Craigslist saying that a guy has a bunch of inkjet papers for sale and he listed a couple of brand names.

Sounds legit to me, so I contacted him, agreed on a price and we met later. Little that I expected that I'd be going home with this:

6917635869_423f4362a6_z.jpg

That's over 300 sheets of large format inkjet with names like Hahnemuhle Lumijet, Harman, Ilford Gallerie, Epson and HP.

But wait, out of his trunk he also produced this:
6917635901_ce648e0543_z.jpg


I blinked, picked up my jaw, pull out my wallet and handed him four twenty dollar bills (more than what we agreed before), told him many thanks, and we chat a bit about printing (he's also a victim of Epson printer's not so clever design of irreplaceable heads).

So I spent some time last night printing one of my pictures on a 310 gsm 8x10 Museum Parchment while learning Canon's way to front-feed heavy papers.

It's sublime.
 
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