There are several good reasons to use the fine art papers available from Breathing Color. First and foremost, your business requires nothing less than the best quality paper available so that your customers are guaranteed to maximize potential color gamut and dmax. Second, by buying direct from a fine art paper manufacturer, you can eliminate middleman distributors and save money in the process.

Cheap papers are suitable for normal printing for pictures to share with friends and family, and also have their use for proofing pictures you intend to print for sale or display on more expensive materials.

Choosing a Surface of a Fine Art Inkjet Paper

You may not like the particular inkjet fine art paper surfaces that you have tried thus far, which could have been the papers you received with your Epson printer. Although the range provided by, for example Epson, is large enough to be confusing, the fine art papers included in it actually only cover a fairly small range of what is available. Using fine art papers from a "third party manufacturer" gives you a much wider choice, including many different smooth and textured inkjet papers and shinier gloss finishes as well as some unusual materials including some non-paper surfaces including fabric such as an inkjet printable silk as well as signage and inkjet banner products such as adhesive vinyl. All of these fine art inkjet papers are available at much more competitive prices and are, in many cases, superior in performance.

Choosing a Weight of a Fine Art Inkjet Paper

The traditional measurement of fine art paper thickness is given in grams per square meter (gsm). Normal typing paper is around 80 gsm, and typical inkjet fine art papers may range from 120-310 gsm. More expensive fine-art papers are usually on or over 300gsm, while the lesser expensive ones are on or below 210gsm. Heavier fine art papers can cause problems with the paper feed in some printers. Small-format models that have a significantly curved path for the paper through the machine are particularly unlikely to be able to use such heavyweight papers. However, despite what the printer manual says, usually double the maximum weight specified with some printers will print fine art without problems.

Archival Qualities of Inkjet Fine Art Paper

Three factors - paper, ink and paper coating - interact to determine print lifetimes, as well as the environmental factors including storage and display conditions. Good fine art papers are likely to lead to longer lifetimes, and as with most other media, this generally means acid-free materials.

Cheaper fine art paper generally will not last well, breaking down over time to give acidic materials that will attack the image. Acid-free papers usually perform better.

The best fine art papers are generally made from 100% cotton rag rather than wood pulp, and these tend to be expensive - at least a dollar for a sheet.

Inkjet Fine Art Paper Confusing Issues

There are actually relatively few manufacturers of high quality papers. The distributors sell many papers made by some manufacturers under different brand names, which makes for some confusion. Claims by some of these re-branders that they specify different coatings for the paper they sell often - if not always - appear to be untrue. The aim of this re-branding is to lock the user into using paper supplied by them, when the same material (but under a different name) may be available more cheaply elsewhere. Breathing Color does not participate in such a strategy and our customers appreciate the exlcusivity and uniqueness of our product line.

Glossy Inkjet Fine Art Papers

Gloss papers are generally made for non-archival use. They range from highly reflective plastic films to materials with a relatively low gloss, that are almost closer to a pearl or lustre finish.

Pigment printers seldom produce good results on gloss surfaces, often giving very slow drying and patchy results.