Two New Papers from Hahnemühle - Paper Chase

Photo Rag Ultra Smooth
Photo Rag Baryta

"Overall this is one of the best smooth matt media that we have tested to date."

Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth

This is a 305gsm media. It is 100% cotton rag base with a moderate amount of OBAs. The surface finish is flat, untextured and very smooth.

On our colour audit tests the media delivered excellent results. The Dmax was 1.59, the metamerism 1.1 Lab points. The shadow detail was held down to 15 RGB points, the highlights up to 250 RGB points. The Granger Chart was smooth and there was no evidence of any gloss differential or patchiness. The average colour error 5.2Lab ΔE/ 2.19ΔE 2000, first-class for a matt media. The skin tones were very close to perfection, assisted by the almost neutral base tone. Overall this is one of the best smooth matt media that we have tested to date.

Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta

This is a 315gsm, 100% cotton rag media which is coated with a pure baryta finish (as opposed to baryta-like). It is bright white in tone and lies alongside Lumijet Natural White in our global tests, that is one of the most neutral surfaces about. It shows no evidence of OBA activity either in its spectral trace or in the ultraviolet viewing booth. As such, therefore, it pushes all the right buttons for the monochrome enthusiast being a very realistic mimic of classic air-dried silver halide fibre-based paper. As with our previous baryta paper testing though, it also performs exceptionally well on colour images.

On colour audit the paper performed exceptionally well. The average error across the Macbeth swatches was
4.1Lab ΔE/2.3ΔE 2000. The full data are compared with
Museo Silver Rag. The paper also passed the 2007 FOGRA/
GRACoL contract proofing standard. Statistically the results are up with the best we have found so that the top contenders in the baryta listing are:
Epson Traditional Photo Paper
Fotospeed Platinum Gloss
Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta
Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl
Innova FibaPrint UltraSmooth Gloss
Museo Silver Rag
Permajet Fibre Base Royal
The choice is thus excellent, as is the quality.

Comparing Hahnemühle
Photo Rag Baryta
and Museo Silver Rag

As part of our trials and tribulations testing Museo Silver Rag, we found that Photo Rag Baryta (HPRB) loaded easily into the sheet feeder of the Epson 3800. This paper is less stiff than some of its competition. This enabled us to make an excellent profile right off with exceptional colour accuracy. We were then able to go back and experiment with the printer platen gap to measure the effect of changing this parameter. The effect manifests itself as a plume of black in spreading out from full black areas and invading the surrounding tones for a distance of 10mm. If these are light, then the contamination is very noticeable, resulting in measured errors of up to 7 ΔE Lab, well outside the tolerances we are shooting for when profiling. The solution (with thanks to the Epson technical people) is to always use the manual rear feeder, the one normally reserved for Velvet Fine Art Paper and Water Color Radiant White. You can still use Premium Luster as your media setting to achieve the correct inking level and stay on Photo Black. This resulted in head strikes when we pushed the Silver Rag through the printer and so it would be of benefit to experiment with the platen gap to solve this issue. We did this with our final piece of Silver Rag and used manual rear feed along with a 'wide' platen gap setting. On this single-sheet test, there were no head strikes so it may have solved the problem.

We thought it was instructive to compare these papers as they are so similar in specification and target usage. They are indeed very similar, you can barely get a scalpel blade between them. The very small variations in any individual parameter are not significant, the costs are almost identical, both are prestigious brands. The Hahnemühle is slightly soft in the hand and, in our limited testing, loaded into the Epson 3800 more easily. We are therefore left with the gloriously simple choice: go for the brand name you prefer, neither media will let you down, they are both absolutely top class.

We always preach that it is important to make and look at real prints when comparing media. To this end we used our last piece of Silver Rag to make a fine art nude sepia-toned monochrome print, along with the same image on the Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta. Given that the profiling was conducted in an identical manner and the prints made the same way, we expected little difference and saw none of any significance. As judged by eye, the Silver Rag was very slightly more yellow, very slightly more saturated and very slightly darker in tone. We then superimposed the plot of the skin tones from the colour audits, which showed a similar trend. Overall the Silver Rag was rendered 2.32% too dark and the HPRB 2.00% too dark; we were pleasantly surprised that we were able to detect it without knowing the values beforehand!

" Barytas…The choice is thus excellent, as is the quality."

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