articles/Paper/prestige-page6
by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2013
Galerie Mono Silk
When this paper was launched in November last year it caused a certain amount of rumbling on the forums, mainly based on the obvious point that the paper is ambivalent to the colour being squirted at it. It is not the first paper to carry a monochrome tag, previous ones coming from Mitsubishi in their Pictorico range, five in total (eg Pictorico GKB Pro B&W Premium Luster RC 285 gsm). The rationale according to Ilford is as follows:
"With the new Gold Mono Silk we wanted to complement the range by offering a product developed especially for black and white printing.
The paper has a very obvious difference in base tint compared to the Gold Fibre Silk, as we've given it a cooler white point using optical brighteners. The idea behind the cooler white tint, as well as the fibre base, is to replicate the qualities that photographers most appreciated about silver halide black and white papers....Gold Mono Silk is designed to remind photographers of a silver halide b&w fibre paper, and matches its silver halide predecessor in paper tint (L*, a*, b*) as well as surface structure as closely as possible."
So there we have it, it's cooler, contains OBAs and looks a bit like Multigrade. Our response was to measure the 'whiteness parameters' but then we brought some 30-year-old legacy prints out of the archives and measured those alongside.
Mike reviews the Ilford Galerie Prestige Galerie Premium.
Mono Silk is remarkably similar to both Ilford Galerie FB and to Multigrade IV RC paper. Additionally, though, the baryta coating of the Mono Silk delivers a very high Dmax using Epson's ABW drivers. To this must be added the bragging rights of it being a specialist monochrome paper which might or might not impress potential clients buying fine art prints.
Playing along with the naming we only tested the paper under monochrome conditions, devoting our energies to finding, in detail, how it responded to the Epson ABW driver. The key parameters are depth of blacks, the clarity of the whites (enhanced in this case by OBAs) and the metamerism. In addition the smoothness of tonal transitions, 'grain' of the tones and detail retention are both image dependent and important.
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