Paper test (work in progress)

The end of the process for most of photographers is to have their work printed and collected in an album or hung on a wall. With the digital darkroom the quality of the final results depend mainly on the printer, the paper and the software used for image processing. In this article we review some of the most common papers available together with a Epson Photo Stylus 1200C:

The following papers will be tested soon:

Moreover a comparison with a lab print will be done.

Costs are relative to prices in Italy, October 2002, in one of the most popular multimedia dealers.

The test

The original image has been printed on a A4 sheet of paper, the photo being enlarged to 25 cm (9.84"). All the prints were made by using an Epson Photo Stylus 1200C at 1440dpi, with original Epson inks and profiles generated by Monaco EZ Color 2.0 and then scanned with a Canon Canoscan N670U at 2800dpi, with no dust removal, no unsharp masking. The enlarged fragments are 39mm (1.53") wide portions of the print resized to 600 pixels in width to match the original sample.

The colour management was fully handled within Adobe Photoshop 6.0 (the colour management options were turned off in the printer driver) and calibrations and scans were done two hours after the print process, to let the inks reasonably dry.

For what concerns colours, the calibrating software did an excellent job since test prints on different papers were almost indistinguishable, which the exception of Crown Jet 120 (but also in this case some manual editing of the profile could solve the problem). This also means that all the papers deliver more or less the same colour quality.

For what concerns details, here are the results.

		This is Roccatederighi, a typical village in Maremma. The photo was taken with Provia 100F, Nikon F80 + AF 180 f2.8N, handheld at 1/250 sec, scanned with Nikon Coolscan IV at 2900 dpi with ICE, manually focused, no unsharp mask.
		This is a detail from the original image; you see here the actual pixel from the scan. Even if no tripod was used, the photo appears quite sharp: for instance look at the details in the roofs and the texture in the walls of the upper-right building (the one with the slanted roof).
		Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper S041287. Looking at the roofs and at the texture in walls you can see that the print does not retain all of the details in the original image have been preserved on paper. This is hardly a problem since in normal viewing conditions the eye wouldn't be able to resolve such fine details; the extra details in the original image could be used in a larger print. The thickness of this paper prevents it from getting waved because of the water present in the ink.
		Epson Photo Paper S041140. The detail level seems pretty much the same as the previous sample. This paper gets a bit waved when it receives the ink, but the problem usually disappears when the ink is dry.
		Crown Jet 177. The detail level seems pretty much the same as the previous sample. This paper gets a bit waved with the ink just as the Epson S041140.
		Crown Jet 120. Surprisingly, since this is not a coated paper, the detail level is still the same. The overall contrast is a bit lower, anyway. The colour rendition shows an evident magenta cast, that could be removed with manual editing of the profile. This paper gets quite waved when it receives the ink. It must be dried with care, possibily put under a stack of plain paper.

Conclusions

The test shows that the all the photo papers have the same quality, both for colours and for details reproductio. The slight loss in details compared to the original image should be related to the printer capabilities, that is the resolution of 1440 dpi.

The Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper S041287 seems to be the best paper in the test, thus justifying the higher price than the other products.

The Epson Photo Paper S041140 and the Crown Jet Carta Patinata Lucida 177 proved to be very similar, both in performance and price (the Epson paper is a bit thicker and heavier than the Crown Jet). Anyway, some preliminary tests seems to show that the Crown Jet tends to fade out colours very quickly; and since it has no competitive advantage over Epson paper, the latter is probably a better choice.

The Crown Jet Carta Patinata Speciale 120 performs worse than the other cited papers, but the colour rendition is not bad. Its major pitfall is the poor mechanic behaviour (gets heavily waved with the fresh ink). If this is not a problem, this paper is a good cheap choice. Note: it should be compared with the same-price Epson S041061, which has noot been tested yet.

Links

Norman Koren publishes lots of stuff about the digital darkroom, including extensive information about printers: http://www.normankoren.com