The Framers Forum

I want to produce some loacal prints to mount and sell. They're not high value items, so I'm looking for a supplier of a reasonably nice matt ink jet paper in a reasonable weight of paper at a sensible price.

I can find plenty of good deals on glossy photo paper, but not for matt paper.

Any good leads, please.

Thanks in anticipation.

Try www.fotospeed.com Mark

depends on what you want exactly

and what kind of size

and what you actually mean by matt, as from a photolab,matt is a pearl paper not a true matt paper

the cost of even a decent paper is less than £1 per a4 sheet and if you use a pro inkjet with big cartidges will only cost about 50p for ink

so for less than £2 you can print an A4 on a good paper

I was already aware of Fotospeed, but had hoped to find something even cheaper. However, having been prompted by John, (thanks John), I took a quick look at their website and found their A4 Matt ultra.

This paper fits the bill quite nicely and unless something cheaper can be found, this is probably what I will go for. My intention is to produce two 5" x 7" prints side by side on each A4 sheet.

These prints are intended to be cheap impulse buy items and local scenes for my shop windows. Many of these are from old engraved images, which I have hand coloured and scanned specifically with this intent in mind.

stcstc wrote:so for less than £2 you can print an A4 on a good paper

Hi Stcstc,

The quality needs to be reasonable, but in this case it will be price sensitive as I was hoping to produce 7" x 5" mounted prints from old hand coloured Victorian and pre-Victorian engravings of local scenes, which I intend to sell as impulse buys to the tourists. I think £2 per printed A4 would be too much to make it worth doing.

I think that the Fotospeed Matt Ultra is probably a workable price, but I still hope to find a cheaper option. I aim to produce two prints from each A4 sheet, which will help.

Mark
I use the Fotospeed Matt Ultra A3 sheets myself. Once the ICC was sorted out for the Ink Flow system, it has proved consistent and IMHO value for money.

Hi John,

I plan to go for an ink-flow system in the not to distant future, I've accqured an Epson 1290 A3 printer for which there is a compatible Fotspeed ink-flow system. However, for my immediate requirements I'm using my Epson C66 A4 printer, for which I have Epson ink, hence the A4 paper.

The 1290 has a cheapo colour cartiridge and I don't want to trust the inks it contains, but I'm not going to get another Epson cartridge for it when I would rather put the cash towards the ink-flow system. So for now I'll use the C66. I will get there, it's just a question of other priorities needing to come first.

When I get the 1290 and it's ink-flow system all calibrated and sorted, I will need to do something about calibrating my scanner as well. This may not be quite so easy, but I'm hoping that I after get the ICC for the printer that I will be able to produce a correct colour calibration print out, scan it and then print it again, then get another ICC profile to use when printing scanned images.

I can't argue about the value for money, which you've mentioned, I've already looked into that and it's a substantial saving.

My Fotospeed "Matt Ultra" paper arrived yesterday and I'm very happy with the results. Fortunately it's quite a "soft" or slightly dull white, (it would have been nice if it had an even older appearance), but the resolution and colour rendition of the printed image is quite extraordinary.