A while back I chastised Innova for their attempt at a fibre based look-a-like called F-Type gloss. The surface looked mostly like shirt cardboard, the kind you get when you buy a dress shirt. Well they seem to have gone back to the drawing board with FibaPrint Ultrasmooth Gloss. All I can say is WOW-my attempts at showing you the surface texture are not so good, but this looks very very much improved to my eye a near dead ringer for Ilford Multigrade Fibre.
Left to right, that is Innova without the gloss optimizer on the Epson R1800, the next is with the gloss optimizer, and the third is the real deal, Ilford multigrade fiberbase. The surface feel is great, the weight is right on, and the brightness is a little too much for me. This paper is very white, whiter than my previous favourite Hannehmuhle Fine Art Pearl. The Fine Art Pearl looks more like coated rag cotton, you can sort of see the weave structure underneath, whereas the Innova has more of a smooth baryta clay surface.
Notice the bronzing with Epson inks, the R1800 does not have the same set as the R2400, which I would expect to exhibit less bronzing. But I like the gloss overspray, it takes the whiteness off the surface and knocks it down, and there is no bronzing to speak of after that. Innova does have profiles for this paper, unfortunately for the R1800, they use the matt media setting which precludes the gloss overspray, otherwise the profile is ok. I will be profiling this paper however.
The other paper I tried out was Harman (née Ilford) Matt FB Mp. The Mp stands for microporous, and my experience with microporous papers in the past, Epson’s forgotten child Colorlife, was abysmal. That paper would never really dry, the surface was the worst kind of lustre surface ever, and the prints would squeak like cheese curds if you rubbed your finger on them. Well Harman seems to have fixed all of that, and the new Matt FB is another dead ringer for my other favourite paper, Ilford multigrade FB matt-see below.
It has exactly the same feel, surface, and color as the original. Also the downloadable profiles from Harman do a good job out of the box although I will probably profile this paper anyway. A great addition, especially for black and white.
Ok, it can’t be all wine and roses can it? Innova seems to have a problem with product naming, I was at Calumet looking at their paper specifier sample pack and there were names for products and no products and names that were similar to other names but not identical. They need to get that sorted out.
Very cool — I didn’t know about either of these papers. I used some of the old FibaPrint and liked the results (not not so much the finish of the paper).