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mer cr ƒ t C MAY/JUNE 2017 • £5.95
REWARDING CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
A FAIRER VISION
MORAG MACDONALD SARAH HICKSON SU KAYE SUZANNE PORTER
HOLD THAT CAMERA! FLIGHT REGULATIONS MAY FORCE YOU TO TRAVEL WITH ONLY A SMARTPHONE… WE CHECK OUT THE SIZE LIMITS
REARVIEW
OUR OPEN GALLERY RETURNS
INKJET MONO
NEW PERMAJET FB MONO GLOSS BARYTA 320 – PLUS OUR GUIDE TO PAPERS DEDICATED TO THE DARKROOM LOOK
GEAR IN USE
FUJIFILM GFX 50S ON ASSIGNMENT SIGMA 12-24mm ƒ4 DG ART ELINCHROM ELB 1200 PROFOTO B1 OLYMPUS OM-D E-M5 II REVISITED YUNEEC TYPHOON H REALSENSE
BARRY SHAFFER
BHUTAN: A KINGDOM OF PEACE IN THE EAST QUIET HEROES: FINDING PEACE IN THE WEST ƒ2 Cameracraft May/June 2017 1
MADE FOR MONO B
lack and white printers head straight for two features when choosing inkjet paper for exhibition and art sale prints – a fibre base, and baryta subcoating. In combination these give a paper a natural texture, colour and stiffness. With the right coating, the layer which takes the ink, they come close to matching the look and feel of an air-dried double weight fibre base darkroom prints. The latest paper in this tradition was launched at The Photography Show by Permajet. It’s not alone in their line-up as an FB Baryta Gloss, or the first they have produced with similar specifications. They have however chosen this time to brand the paper specifically as Mono, something which Ilford Photo already do though not with exactly the same kind of air-dried gloss finish. It is the exact look of the new Permajet paper which differs a little from the usual FB Baryta Gloss. It’s got less obvious texture, and a higher natural gloss which actually does look more like a traditional darkroom gloss dried on an air rack. The paper weight, at 320gsm, is close to regular doubleweight while some inkjet papers now aim for 330 to 360gsm. Permajet’s less glossy FB Distinction was previously 360gsm but now shares the 320gsm base. To test the new paper, I unearthed all the past tests I could find and also my recent stocks of similar papers. The Epson Stylus Pro 3800 was fired up after a few months of inactivity and this is always an expensive and time consuming process. It’s now over twice the the age at which the service firmware instructs Epson engineers to scrap the machine, but my use has been very light with probably only 100 prints a year or so running through it. The cost of the supplies has been so high that it’s never been a printer to use casually, and when a commercial requirement for a few prints has come in, there has been 14 May/June 2017 ƒ2 Cameracraft
The latest inkjet paper from Permajet, launched at The Photography Show, is their FB Mono Gloss Baryta 320. This fibre-based baryta sub-coated heavy paper has the look and feel of air-dried natural darkoom DW gloss. David Kilpatrick looks at the new paper, an ink kit, and popular alternatives.
Above: Ullswater by Shirley Kilpatrick, one of the test files used for A3 prints with Permajet FB Mono Gloss Baryta 320; and the Marrutt PhotoChroms R-88 complete cartridge replacement kit for Epson 3800 (£195.95 ex VAT).
a 75% chance that the necessary replacement inks or maintenance cartridge would wipe out the entire value of the order. It has
nine 80ml ink cartridges, any one of which can run low and prevent printing until a £40 replacement has been fitted. This means
keeping a £360 ink set in hand. With the printer now so old, though still performing really well, it’s so tempting just to buy an alternative A2+ printer (17”) . A new P3880, which uses improved inks costing around 10% less on the market, is almost £1,500. The SureColor P800 is an updated model with wifi connection at £500 less, and a similar further improvement 80ml ink set – but the cartridges you get with any new printer are only 50% full. So, when Marrutt did an offer last year for a complete set of refillable replacement cartridges with a set of nine 60ml PhotoChrome R-88 replacement inks at £121.95+VAT with the cartridge kit free (saving £74), I went for it immediately just to put in the supply cupboard. We had already tested the refillable cartridge concept a few years ago with a couple of selected inks. It’s very easy, you just remove a chip from a near-exhausted original Epson and fit it into the Marrutt cartridge. Syringes with long steel probe tubes are used to transfer ink very cleanly from the 60ml foilsealed bottles, and it takes about five minutes per colour to refit your printer. You are supposed only to use chips from cartridges with over 10% ink left, but when it came to it, even those with just a bare level visible worked. Testing on known papers, the Marrutt inkset proved satisfactory with off-the-shelf ICC profiles intended for Epson OEM inks. Monochrome printing shows up any shifts in neutrality and the most accurate test, on the Epson printers, is to use a genuine Epson paper and its matching profile. I checked FB Baryta mono printing using Epson Traditional Photo Paper, which is precisely this type of material, and the result was perfectly neutral. The same will apply to industry standard replacement ink sets from Permajet, Fotospeed or Lyson (all well-proven). I can’t vouch for any other alternatives. Of course what actually
happens now with a new paper, provided there is at least a stock ICC profile with printer settings to download, is that you fire up your fully colour managed system, open an image, enter the settings and your first print is perfect. The Permajet ICC profile produced, as expected, a very slightly warm eight-colour result. For dead neutrality, the printer does not need a colour profile; just use its own colour management, and select Advanced Mono printing. The colour profile name usefully indicates that EPL (Lustre) is the correct paper type to set. Some FB Gloss papers use the glossy paper type and still others need Semi Gloss. Get it wrong and you may get under or over inking. There’s no secret software needed. For several years my P3800 has occupied too much space in my small office getting covered in paperwork, just to have the printer connected either to my router hub by ethernet, or by USB to the Mac. One reason is that Adobe Creative Cloud subscription only allows two activated machines, in my case one laptop and my production iMac 27 (2013 vintage). A complete 2009 iMac 27 waits as a potential backup in case of Mac failure, but it’s not possible to launch any Adobe program just to use this for printing when the other two computers have the suite activated. So I used iPhoto, Apple’s now superseded consumer photo editing program. Like most Apple software this has rock-solid colour management and access to printer driver features, so it is perfectly able to handle print output. Relocated to my workroom (former darkroom) the wifi router access points were far out of reach. There’s a secondary consumer unit (fuse box and separated ring circuit) serving it but it is possible to get ethernet to run over the AC power wiring. A pair of TP-Link 500bps plug-in devices couldn’t reach, but new TP-Link 1000bps boxes with dual ethernet sockets bridged the hundred feet of wiring between my office and the workroom successfully, also making it possible to print from the Adobe-activated machines. To do this, you need to be
Top: during the test. The two A3 prints of the tree and church picture are with the ICC profile, left, and using Epson Advanced Mono printing, right. The slight warmth of the profiled result can be matched by tweaking the settings for this method. Above: the slightly textured, natural gloss of the paper shown using reflection.
able to load up paper in the sheet feeder. Epson recommends that papers of 330gsm and over are fed using the manual rear feed instead, individually, which is not practical when the printer is at the other end of the building. The new Permajet FB Mono Baryta Gloss at 320gsm is not only safe to use in the sheet feeder, it doesn’t cling and double-feed or jam. In fact it’s so well behaved that I would trust it for print runs. However, like all gloss baryta papers I have used, Permajet’s material emerges with slightly soft ink on the surface and does not take on its final density and appearance until it has dried down. Stacking a few sheets on the exit tray is perfectly OK but
the fresh prints should ideally be handled with care, placed individually to dry shortly after emerging, and only packing up for delivery to a client, mounting or framing after a day. This is how you should treat all fine art inkjet prints, though some surfaces simply soak up the ink immediately (matt proofing papers, standard RC gloss and lustre intended for high volume output). During handling, my test prints could pick up fingerprints on dark areas even after full drying; lightly buffing with a soft cloth removed these entirely without scratching the surface. There is just a shadow differentiation in the look of the gloss between maximum blacks
and darker shadows. There is only a trace of highlight differentiation too, and under most lighting conditions the finish looks like a conventional photo print and not like some inkjet gloss coatings, which only need to pick up the light the wrong way to show where the ink is and where it isn’t. There is no trace of bronzing, and under a range of illuminants (fluorescent, daylight, tungsten and 6000K LED) no colour shifts within the range of tones on the print. This matters now that LED lights may be used in galleries and shops. The overall tint does change a little. The base is a natural white, not brightened and not ‘warm’ . It’s very much like the darkroom paper it emulates. My verdict on the Permajet paper and its Mono branding? It’s going to be compatible with more printers with sheet feeder input because of the weight and stiffness/flexibility of the stock, it handled the notoriously picky feed and print path of the P3800 perfectly, and the result looks just like an Ilfobrom DW print. It is also entirely suitable for colour as the surface is that little bit smoother than some FB baryta natural gloss materials. Compared to the same maker’s less ‘glazed’ FB Distinction, the result is so much closer to a darkroom photo print – an objective in which the maker has succeeded.
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