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Paper Chase - Board Meetings - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5

by Mike McNamee Published 01/04/2005

Also with larger boards, double check that you have sufficient clearance on the entrance and exit side of the printer - we ruined a sheet by allowing it to crash into a box on the floor, thus stopping the board from moving right at the very end; very annoying.

KIRKLAND Signature

One of the more entertaining games that we get to play is guessing the source of inkjet papers. Ilford for example claims to coat more than 50% of the world supply of these papers. Late last year there was an outbreak of speculation as to the provenance of the Costco paper bearing the Kirkland Signature. If you are unfamiliar with Costco, they are an American owned chain with numerous trade outlets in the UK. (You can walk into Costco hungry, thirsty, naked and bereft of any consumer product and leave with the lot at trade prices!). The word on the street was that the paper was a re-badged Ilford product. It seems to have taken a little longer to arrive in the UK but on our last visit there it was on the shelves. At £10.99 for a box of 125 A4 sheets we could not leave it on the shelves. So we rushed home with it, to do a Sherlock Holmes, colour audit.

The back of the box does say "Made in Switzerland" which was a good start. We profiled the paper using the Ultra chrome Photo Black ink set and then audited the output. This is a fantastic paper at the price; it will stand alongside the best on the market. It is not identical to the boxed, Ilford product but is so close that any workflow (profiles, RIP settings, etc) will reproduce so closely that you will only tell the difference with calibrated spectros! The Kirkland has a near identical spectral power distribution but a slightly higher optical brightener content (OBA) which renders it slightly cooler. The Dmax is a commendable 2.13 and, in common with our American cousins, we found no evidence of bronzing with the profile we built using the new X-Rite Pulse system. We seemed to be just on the cusp however, as the final shadow patch was just a fraction lighter than the previous patch. The greyscale linearity was good down to about 25 RGB points, where it bottomed out then climbed up again (by about 0.01 Dmax points). Some profile tweaking would probably improve this. Like other resin-coated papers the metamerism in the mid tone grey (D65 to Tungsten at 50% brightness) was slightly elevated when compared to a matt fine art paper.

The coolness of the paper degraded the skin tones more than an equivalent fine art paper, the additional blueness dragging down the saturation. The opposite effect was seen on the landscape tones, which were very accurate, helped by the availability of the deeper maximum tones.

"...I have been doing some independent research on the Kirkland paper source. I believe what I have learned to be accurate and my sources, who wish to remain anonymous, I believe are quite reliable.

The Kirkland Professional Glossy paper is manufactured in Switzerland by Ilford on a special contract formulated basis. It is a very high volume seller and there are no plans to put it out in larger sizes any time soon. Ilford does contract paper formulations for other chains in the USA and they all seem to have a different tweak to them...For those of you who have been curious about this Costco/Kirkland paper situation I hope this post is of some value..."

posting from the Yahoo Digital Black and White Forum January 05

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1st Published 01/04/2005
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Paper Chase - Board Meetings - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5