Paper Choice?

[ravncat]

Originally Posted by Optikal iLLusion

Im just gonna take a shot here on a couple things.. I used to work at an office supply store and learned from a couple people there that you should be careful about using "off brand" .

For the most part, this encompasses two things, some cheaper papers, tend to have coatings that sometimes don't work very well with the inks. If the coating is really bad, you can end up with ink that will smear all over the place - which is pretty much what you are going to see with things that aren't coated at all.

The second thing, is that printers tend to come with profiles for the ink and papers that are sold by that company - so you won't get best results on third party papers without first finding a profile or making your own. Alot of good third party fine art makers have profiles that you can download for your printer on the site and they're fine to use.

As another side note, I think it's more important to go with brand inks (off brand inks can be fine, but often color shift or fade over time faster, and have different color gamuts, and you can have a hard time getting best color without making your own ink/paper combination profiles)

[Bruce A]

I'm glad I found this thread. Congrats on the printer Jon. I've got a R3000 on the way and there's some good advice here. I'm getting pretty excited at the prospect of doing larger prints. Now I just need to find an outlet for reasonably price frames and matte board.

[ravncat]

Originally Posted by Bruce A

I'm glad I found this thread. Congrats on the printer Jon. I've got a R3000 on the way and there's some good advice here. I'm getting pretty excited at the prospect of doing larger prints. Now I just need to find an outlet for reasonably price frames and matte board.

If you have the room a decent matte board cutting rail and bevel cutter are near 100 bucks. Can find cheaper or more expensive. Big sheets of matte board are around 5 bucks. Somewhere around making 40 mattes at 8 x12 size and you start to break even with custom bought mattes ( not pre cut, if you use nonstandard size ). Precut and it takes alot more because theyre usually cheap. So it can be worth it to do your own matte cutting.

[rosserx]

I have an Epson 1400 and my favorite paper is the Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster. Stay away from gloss. Blacks come out much richer on luster paper. Experiment though, try all kinds of stuff. Here is a website you can order sample packs of everything imaginable. Have fun! Sample Paper Packs Inkjet Photo Fine Art Papers ATLEX.COM

[Bruce A]

Originally Posted by rosserx

I have an Epson 1400 and my favorite paper is the Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster. Stay away from gloss. Blacks come out much richer on luster paper. Experiment though, try all kinds of stuff. Here is a website you can order sample packs of everything imaginable. Have fun! Sample Paper Packs Inkjet Photo Fine Art Papers ATLEX.COM

Thanks Ross, unfortunately they don't seem to send orders over to down under or anywhere else outside the US. I just ordered some matte paper to get started. Hopefully all will arrive by the week's end.