Luminous Landscape News Feed- September 11, 2007 - New Harman Byrata Paper Review

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September 11, 2007 - New Harman Byrata Paper Review

For any photographer with traditional darkroom experience the inkjet printing revolution has been both a blessing and a curse. While on the one hand we are now able to produce prints with greater longevity that ever before, with greater dMax than ever before, and with higher colour saturation that ever before, we can't do so all on the same paper type at the same time.

Printing has been bifurcated between so-called fine art matte finish papers, which can have lovely texture and feel, but flatter blacks and reduced saturation, and so-called photo papers with plastic bases that have higher dMax and wide colour gamut, but, which are, well, plastic, and thus not that well suited to fine art use.

Over the past couple of years there have been a number of papers introduced which have attempted to combine the best attributes of both paper types. Some have done so better than others, but none really came all that close to matching the desirable qualities of traditional fiber based glossy photographic papers. Until now.

At last year's Photokina in Cologne I met with Harman paper and discussed their intention to develop a Baryta-based paper that would address this shortcoming. Over the months since I have had the opportunity to test ever-improving implementations of this new paper, and have been very excited by what I was seeing.

I had started to work on a review scheduled to coincide with Harmon's release of Harman Gloss FB AL. But previous contributor to this site, photographer and educator Richard Lohmann, was also working on a review, and I have deferred to him on this. His commentary and review of the world's first Baryta based inkjet paper is now online.

I should add though that Hahnemuhle last week announced Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta, and I expect to have samples available for testing before long. These are exciting times for anyone involved in fine art printing. ...

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