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Paper Chase - Board Meetings - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5

by Mike McNamee Published 01/04/2005

Paper Mill Direct

This is the outlet name for supplying materials converted by the Lake District specialist, James Cropper. Their mills have been making high-grade papers since before the invention of photography, at their Burneside and Cowan Head mills. They are widely regarded as the authority on museum-grade paper and board conversion; indeed they make archival boxes for the Bodlean library and paper for Hansard. A majority of the consumer products on our shelves are, or have been, wrapped in Cropper products.

They make a number of boards and probably the most exciting is the canvas material launched at Focus this year (Canvas Buckram, due out April 05). This overcomes many of the stretching problems associated with the lighter inkjet canvases as well as saving on the cost of a stretcher frame and. if you have it done out, the cost of actually stretching and mounting. Within their Impact and Impart ranges they also supply Gloss and Pearl board (for photographers) and Soft Textured Art and PhotoSmooth High White for fine art use. These were reviewed back in October 04; the board surfaces behave just like their paper counterparts and the colour data are not repeated here.

Canvas Buckram

This is a very fine weave material with a pattern quite unlike any other canvas we have tested to date. It is very much finer than others and the coating is more delicate with no apparent flooding of the coating around the weave of the canvas. This will be an advantage for producing group portraits, as the scale at which subjects' eyes disappear into the weave will be smaller. From normal viewing distances there seems to be a repeat textile pattern about 1cm in pitch. Within this, the detailed pattern is an interlocked hourglass shape (see the macro image). The base colour is cream and there is no evidence of any optical brighteners in use, either from the UV booth or the spectral power distribution. The brightness is high at 97.5%, suggesting high-quality substrate materials and coatings. The matt surface delivers a slightly lower Dmax and gamut volume than some other canvas materials we have looked at. Metamerism was moderately low at 2.3. Overall this looks to be a very interesting development and we look forward to testing it more thoroughly when production qualities become available. There are, for example, varnishing and coating trials, which might reveal yet further delights. Initial coating trials suggest that this is a water resistant combination with Epson Ultrachrome and DCP Giclee varnish - a very tasty combination indeed! Two coats of DCP gloss varnish pushed the Dmax up to 1.51 with a general increase on sparkle over the whole print.

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1st Published 01/04/2005
last update 09/12/2022 14:51:47

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