Somerset Photo Satin is a thick (300gsm), 100% cotton fine-art paper made by St Cuthberts Mill, one of the oldest paper makers in the U.K. It is quite white, with a brightness of 97.5%, and it is free of whiteners and other optical brightening agents (OBAs). It does, however, contain buffering agents designed to help protect the paper from atmospheric contaminants.

The paper is extremely smooth—which is where we’re assuming the ‘satin’ designation comes from—with no visible fuzz or imperfections. It produces prints with a nice broad color gamut and deep blacks: color images are bright and well-saturated, and black-and-white photos have a warm, silky feel to them, with excellent range and rich blacks. (Moab says that the paper has a dMAX of 1.75, which is quite good for a fine-art paper.)

We were consistently pleased with the paper’s overall tonal range, detail and color transitions. Unlike some other fine-art papers we’ve used, Somerset Photo Satin holds detail extremely well in the shadows, without blocking up and creating areas of mud. On our Stylus Pro 3800, Somerset Photo Satin produced better color and black-and-white prints than either Hahnemühle’s Photo Rag or Epson’s Velvet Fine Art.

Viewers felt that Somerset Photo Satin was most comparable to Epson’s Ultrasmooth Fine Art paper, another of our favorites. Somerset Photo Satin has a slighter hint of texture than Ultrasmooth Fine Art, but it is also whiter than Epson’s paper (which has a brightness of 90%). Some people liked images on the Epson paper, while others preferred the Moab paper, but all said it was more of a personal preference with respect to the paper’s finish and color more than the quality of the print.

Overall, we think Somerset Photo Satin is an exquisite paper for people looking for gallery-quality prints on fine-art media. Moab has only posted an ICC profile for Somerset Photo Satin and the Stylus Pro 3800, but they should have more fairly soon, and we’re working on creating profiles for HP’s Vivera inks (for the B8850 and the B9180), as well as the Canon Pixma Pro9500 and iPF6100 printers.

Somerset Photo Satin is available in a variety of sizes. As we noted in our original post, it isn’t cheap: Twenty-sheet boxes of letter-size paper are $58, although we’ve found it as low as $42 on Amazon. Tabloid sheets (11" by 17") are priced at $115 ($80 at Amazon) and 13" by 19" sheets are $130 ($95 at Amazon). You can also purchase the paper in standard European sizes and in 17", 24", 44" and 60" rolls.

Given that HP’s Smooth Fine Art is regularly $4 per 13" by 19" sheet—although it’s a more reasonable $2.40 per sheet via Amazon—getting it for $2 per sheet is quite nice.

Somerset Photo Satin is designed for use by photographers interested in selling their work, and is priced accordingly: it’s a little under $3 per letter-size sheet, and $6.50 for a 13"x19" sheet. It is also available in 17", 24", 44" and 60" rolls.

Romar’s Post-Pix are definitely from the pre-digital era. They have a paper protector that hides a strong adhesive on the front of the card; you simply remove that and affix any 4" by 6" photo in its place. The result is a nice, thick postcard that holds up well in the mail, and makes a great statement with your own pictures.

We’ve been using Post-Pix for months to send out little guerilla pix and general announcements. We’ve even been printing messages and addresses on the postcard backs before we put the photo on the front. Folks who’ve been on the receiving end have repeatedly told us how much they liked them.

 
Sure, you can make your own with some glue and paper, but that’s a pain in the butt—we’ve gone that route plenty of times, and it’s always painful. You can also just mail a photo, but it’s hard to get thick enough photo paper that won’t bend or rip once it hits the mail stream.

We’ve found them online—with plain or themed backs—for $6 for a pack of 25, and ProPhoto had them in a 100-sheet pack for approximately $25.

Of course, if you want to go totally retro, Ilford still sells Multigrade IV RC photo paper for use in the darkroom.

When you want to compare prints between printers, it helps to have a more-level playing field. Looking at a print from competitive printers on the same paper stock can help draw some clear delineations on the qualities of a specific unit. To get to this point, we profile the paper-printer combination with either X-Rite’s i1 or DataColor’s PrintFIX Pro, which gives us an ICC profile that we can use when printing from Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. Both products do a very good job of creating ICC profiles for us: the X-Rite solution offers more automation, but the PrintFIX system–since replaced by the Spyder3 Studio–is significantly less expensive. We find the profiles created with both to generally be of high quality, although you can often find very good profiles on the paper vendors’ Web sites.

When printing on matte papers, we’ve found Epson’s Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte (formerly Enhanced Matte) to be a good strong paper that has held up well and reproduces images very well on printers from Epson, Canon and HP.

Glossy papers are a different story. We haven’t found that the glossy paper stocks from the different printer vendors necessarily do well when used on competing manufacturers, whether or not the paper has been profiled. It also gives us an excuse to try alternative paper types, and we’ve found two recently that we really like, Lasal Photo Gloss 270 from Moab Paper, and Red River Paper’s UltraPro Gloss.

Lasal Photo Gloss 270 is a midweight paper with a high-gloss finish, bright white color, and no optical brighteners. It’s priced from under $9 for 50 4×6 sheets to about $30 for 50 letter-size sheets on Amazon. To our tastes, which generally tend to matte-based and fiber papers, Lasal Gloss one of the best glossy stocks we’ve seen, and it has a nice thick weight to it that gives it a little better feel than the photo papers from the printer vendors.

Red River’s UltraPro Gloss comes in both 68- and 78lb. weights, and is nearly as bright (albeit with a cool slight-blue cast) as the Lasal. Its finish is a bit less glossy, but the 68-lb. version is a bargain at $30 for a box of 100 letter-size sheets ($48 for 50 13×19 sheets), and it works great with both dye and pigment inks.

If you want something with a bit more gloss that is as bright as the Lasal, Red River has a slightly pricier Arctic Polar Gloss, which is priced at $42 for 100 letter-size sheets.