articles/Paper/teccopaperselection-page1
by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2009
The Granger Chart showed an area of patchiness as outlined by the white arrows. See the text.
These papers are distributed in the UK by Colour Confidence. Tecco is a large, German paper company with a huge range of media surfaces. Just within the 'inkjet photo' field they have eight 'Professional Portraiture', nine 'Photographers Selection' and eight 'Fine Art' surfaces. This, however, is what you see if you go to www.tecco-photo.com. If, as we did, you stumble upon www.tecco.de then you find more than 40 papers for large-format printing and another 40 papers under the 'EFI' banner, which are predominantly proofing and contract proofing papers. This then is the backdrop against which we look at a selection of 10 papers from the 'Photo' range.
PROFILES
Profiles are available for all 22 papers in the photo range, 13 Epson, 4 Canon and 1 HP printer types (eg 7800/9800 is one type). We checked out profiles for the Epson 3800, which included comprehensive listings of settings, although there is no profile for SGD 250 and we chose to exclude it from our tests for the moment. One half of the instruction sets calls for the use of Black Point Compensation, another table calls for it not to be used, which needs clarification. We went with the general opinion and used BPC in the ON position. There is a lot of work in testing 10 papers and if you do purchase a trial pack you need to be very fastidious with your settings (just a few papers call for 1440dpi rather than the more popular 2880dpi, for example).
he TECCO papers cover a wide range of base tones, with varying amounts of OBA. The downward excursion towards -10 Lab b points blue is unusual and very cool in look.
The papers in the trial pack fall into three natural categories, baryta, canvas and the gloss/lustre surfaces. However, the gloss and lustre surfaces are actually very different to each other. The matt and canvas matt media call up Matt Black ink, the others Photo Black ink. Recommendations are also made for changing the Color Density settings in the Epson drivers - this is quite unusual, but we adhered to the values asked for. We also adhered to the chosen dpi values although claims are made by Epson that this has little influence. We also find this to be so although we can actually measure a difference on the spectrophotometers. The Tecco profiles from the web are high resolution, 918 patch-sets from an X-Rite DTP70.
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