Paper Chase - Somerset Photo Paper

Despite having made paper for over 500 years, the Swiss firm Sihl is relatively unknown in the photographic market. That is about to change as they have decided to promote their product range more vigorously into our sector and the two papers reviewed here are the vanguard of a number of surfaces. The Sihl catalogue is extensive, indeed the swatch book is 45mm thick and they have experience of supplying papers in roll form for quite some time. The range they make includes several types of gloss and lustre inkjet surfaces as well as vinyl and canvases. How many will eventually find their way into the deep red boxes of the P3 Studio range is not yet confirmed.

4800 High Gloss 330gsm

As you would expect from its weight, this is a big beefy paper with a calliper of 300 microns. It is moderate to high gloss, not quite as shiny as the Ilford material, reviewed last issue. It has a micro-porous, instant-dry coating, and is quite heavily laden with optical brightening agents (OBAs) to give it a bright, cool appearance.

As the material was new to us we initially tested it for basic properties and needed to see how long it took to dry down. In this test we printed a full black swatch and started a stopwatch running as soon as the ink was set on the paper. We then measured the reflectance of this full black (the highest ink loading) at regular intervals to monitor any changes. The Dmax took us by surprise as the deepest we have ever measured at 2.55, falling to 2.50 after drying fully. When measuring dry-down, a difference of less than 1 ΔE Lab is considered stable and, in fact, this media, with the Epson UltraChrome K3 ink, was stable within the first minute. We stopped our test at 40 minutes.

The paper was visually cool with a base white extending almost 7 points towards blue and a lift in the spectral trace of about 6½ per cent at 440nm. In the UV booth it stood out as really bright. For this reason we expected the statistical data on our audit process to be slightly compromised and this turned out to be the case.

Sihl provide a number of icc profiles for the 4800 and 4802 gloss materials using the printers listed in the table. There are a comprehensive set of profiles available for the leading RIPs. Other icc printer profiles will, no doubt, follow. The profiles were quite small at 631KB suggesting a small number of swatches had been used in their creation. This was reinforced by examining the Granger Charts from the audit prints, which were a little ragged. The composite image shows the Granger Chart soft proofed, with both the Sihl profile and a bespoke one, made from 343 swatches. Even though this is less than our normal 728 swatch profile, the improvement in smoothness is quite apparent. Using an Epson 4800 as a test bed we obtained reasonable, but not outstanding, audit data using the Sihl profile and only a 20% improvement using a bespoke profile. As so often happens with papers laden with OBAs, the mapping of the profile drags the saturation of skin tones down towards the blue of the base paper. The print from the Sihl profile was biased magenta about that which might be obtained from a selenium toning of a silver halide print. It was not unpleasant in the way a green-biased print would be, but was sufficiently out of whack for us to set about bespoke profiling straight away! The print made with the bespoke profile was a good, clean and bright rendering. The Dmax was mapped down slightly at 2.48 and the metamerism was low at 0.9 ΔE Lab (D65 to Tungsten A illuminants). We measured slightly higher gamut volumes off the bespoke profile than the Sihl profile and there might be a little more in hand with a high-resolution profile build. There was some evidence of bronzing in parts of the gamut.

Overall then this was a promising start to the Sihl excursion into the professional photographic market. The paper will find a following from those who need a weighty paper with saturated colours, high gloss and high Dmax. The very particular user is probably going to need a bespoke profile or some testing to get the best from this cool paper.

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