Digital BW, The Print

Ok everybody. Here is what I would suggest. Mark needs about 25 new  
members/test. To me, this is a very steep business curve (not that I'm  
an expert only owning a very small business of my own). So I would  
suggest to all the professional photographers, professors, students,  
and everyone else to get the word out that there's a new testing  
facility in town and that it needs our/your support to get running  
good. If we can gather a community around it, than maybe we can  
strengthen our own profession/work as a whole and further the cause of  
what we do. That includes creating a print-process archive (a side- 
note of Mark's in an earlier post.)

I agree with Tyler on HPR. I've lost thousands of dollars in both  
direct HPR costs (ie: paper going bad and not recouped by Hahnemuhle)  
and probably tens of thousands more (it's too painful to even do the  
accounting on this) in lost print-jobs because of yellowing problems  
in Chicago *not in lab where we have air purifiers, but out-of-lab.

HPR has the best dMax and least flaking and drag-line (ie: Innova  
Cotton Rag) issues of any Cotton rag paper out there with Piezography  
inks on matte paper. That's why I use it. But it has so many  
permanence problems that I vote to focus on some other more stable  
paper. Maybe at this point in this forum and a few others we can start  
to make our voices heard and look for another standard. HPR has been  
around for a long time and it has had as many problems for a long  
time. While its surface quality control is great (everyone here as  
probably seen the fish-scaling of Moab duo and Innova SC in the shadow  
tones on some paper batches am I right?) I no longer recommend it for  
serious archival work because I've been burned too many times. While  
ink-fade and shift is a really critical part of the equation, the more  
immediate problems I face as a digital print-maker are paper surface  
degradation problems. These things crop up in a few weeks to a few  
years and are absolutely devastating to both our profession and our  
clients. I understand this is a whole other world of science, but I  
would like to see a paper that starts off stable. I guess I would be  
ok with HPR though if the majority agreed we should use that as a  
standard base for ink tests. I guess it's more about the inks than the  
paper and HPR seems dependable as far as fade results are concerned.  
In my opinion, it's just not a dependable paper-base outside of ink  
stability.

Walker