Watercolor papers for fine art giclée prints from your inkjet printer.

If you need archival quality fine art paper, canvas, or acid-free pH-neutral fine art paper where can you find this for modern digital wide format inkjet printers? At the CeBIT computer trade show in Hannover, Germany, we visited the booth of Schleicher & Schuell, home of Hahnemuehle products from Hahnemuehle Paper Mill.

If you are selling fine art giclée prints your customers are going to want, even demand, acid-free pH-neutral archival fine art paper. Museums and libraries will require this class of paper. So if you are looking for a wide format media you can trust, either as sheet-fed or in rolls, check out Hahnemuehle paper products.

FLAAR has been using various individual kinds of fine art papers over the last two years. Parrot Digigraphic has arranged for some Epson media to be sent to FLAAR for testing. Parrot offers a full range of fine art media for artists and photographers. You can get Hahnemuehle water color paper here for example.

We are setting up an evaluation center for large format printer fine art media. However these will be "real life" tests, using real rooms with actual sunlight and light bulbs. No tests under darkened conditions that are unrealistic. Also, we use human eyeballs to do the testing. After all, its people that look at art and photographic exhibits, not instruments. Obviously many aspects have to be measured with objective documentation.

But what counts is not really whether your ink will last 200 years, but will the surface of your media last even 20 days?

Maybe you would like to hear about the fine art media that lost its surface after being rolled and unrolled just a few times.

One person told us his cheap media was supposed to be water fast, but all the image washed off after a few rains. He lost his client. So would not have helped him to have 200 year ink rating!

Then there is the infamous media that curls up at the edges, causing Roland printheads to self-destruct with a headstrike. $530 per head strike, plus several days down time waiting for a technician (piezo heads are not user serviceable).

So these are the aspects of media which FLAAR at Bowling Green State University and FLAAR at Francisco Marroquin University will tackle.

It will take a while to obtain the grants and funding, but we have already initiated the process by preparing "Standards for the Evaluation of Surface Quality and Usability of Inkjet Media." Nicholas Hellmuth has also recently written "Standards of Evaluation for RIP´s for Wide Format Inkjet Printers."

If you need watercolor paper for an Iris, Ixia, Mimaki, Mutoh I-Jet, Accuplot, or Agfa, or any of the Kodak printers which really is a Mutoh under the Kodak label, contact via ITNH, mterlizzi@itnh.com.

If you seek watercolor paper for your Epson or any comparable printer which uses Epson printheads (Roland, etc), contact Sandra Jarry, e-mail imaging@parrotcolor.com.

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