Paper for Optical Printing

[elias_roustom]

<p>So Supra Endura is all there is for optical printing anymore? The Kodak website lists a bunch of other papers, some optimized for digital, others for both digital and optical, but big retailers only carry Supra Endura - one carries Portra Endura but in Pearl finish only. Fuji only lists Crystal Archive as ideal for digital.<br>

Is that it? Do the the sheets for digital printing work well under a traditional light source?</p>

[tibz]

<p>I looked into this when I first started optical printing. Most of the newer paper is optimized for digital and analog means. I don't believe that buying a paper optimized for digital output has any trade-offs when printing optically.</p>

<p>When I looked at B&H there was one crystal archive paper which was optimized for just analog printing in the luster finish. I got that and it worked great.</p>

[patrick_mont]

<p>Surpa Endura and Crystal Archive is all that is left for color that I know of when printing negatives. Ilfochrome is also still available.</p>

[john_shriver]

<p>Portra Endura in stores is old stock, it's discontinued. Supra Endura has a wider gamut, which is what folks want for digital printing. They can get the Portra Endura look by using a color managed workflow, and editing the image to moderate saturation.<br>

The optical printing market isn't large enough to keep any RA-4 paper on the market. It's all optimized around digital. Now there are digital-only papers that don't balance out the orange mask.</p>

[a._valerio]

<p>I used both Supra Endura E Luster and Fuji Crystal Archive Super C glossy in the darkroom for a course I took last May. Both papers performed well, as far as I could tell, and a bonus was that optical printing had a lot less grain and noise than the same negatives scanned on my Minolta film scanner. I keep hearing that the newer Fuji papers are not right for optical printing, but our prints looked good, so I don't know why people say this.</p>

<p>Oh, and we did play with the cyan knob on the color head even though you're apparently not supposed to touch it according to the rules of traditional optical printing...maybe that's how we got decent prints on the papers we had; I don't know enough about optical printing on digitally-optimized papers to tell. But I do know that the paper was advertised as being suitable for both digital AND optical printing. (And my minilab uses a different paper, called Crystal Archive type II, which is similar to Super C, but optimized only for digital exposure as I understand it.</p>

<p>We did not mess with Fuji Super P, as we wanted saturation and snap. Also, I think Kodak has stopped selling cut sheets of Endura E. Someone correct me if I am wrong.</p>

<p>I have quite a bit of both Fuji and Kodak RA-4 paper of various sizes and surfaces left over, but no one seems to want it. We tried ebaying it twice with no success.</p>

[franklin_polk]

<p>I use Super C, and have found no problems with it, (no use of cyan), although I know of people that use Supra with no problems as well. I also have been liking Mitsubishi, its pretty nice. The other problem with digital papers is that sometimes they are optimized for incredibly short exposure times, like 1-2 seconds. Its really hard to print with times like that.</p>

[jonathan_dalton]

<p>I just started colour printing with Supra. It was all I could find as well. I suppose once 99% of the market is using photoshop to tweak colours, they figure one paper is all that's necessary.<br>

I only hope they continue to make optically printable paper for a long time even if it's only one variety. </p>

<p> </p>

[bob_himmelright]

<p>Fuji crystal archive will work well for both optical and digital. The "optimised for digital" on both kodak and fuji papers essentialy means it has less repricocity failure or color shifts using short exposure times whitch digital uses. When we switched from the old CA to the new fuji CA II "optimised for digital" in our old optical minilab, the only thing we noticed was the initial balance was a hair more magenta, after recalibrating for it, its the exact same.</p>