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Paper Chase - Fotospeed Panorama Paper

by Mike McNamee

Panoramas are a good business item. They are very acceptable as gifts and have the advantage that non-photographers cannot easily make or print them thus adding perceived value - they also look handsome on most walls and always generate a lot of viewer interest. With a two- or three-inch matt all round they look reasonably sumptuous without costing eye-watering amounts to have framed.

Making such a pan is straightforward these days as Photoshop, Elements and the like will stitch them nicely. The image used as an example here is a seven-frame stitch using portrait format on a DSLR. This of course gives tons of pixels for a 24-inch print, the file size was 270MB and the effective resolution was more than 700ppi - plenty to spare then!

The advantage of the Fotospeed papers is convenience. While you can use roll papers or slice up an A2, that may provide more material than you want. Buy the sample boxed set and you should be able to make your money many times over and have somewhere to store the spares. The Fotospeed Panoramic Test Pack at £29.95 shows a 30% saving and in addition if the 24 sheets were bought separately you would need to buy six packs (3 Art papers and 3 Photo Quality papers) of 25 sheets to find the finish you are after.

These papers were introduced in 2014 but this is our first time to profile and print on some of them. The pan format is 210mm x 594mm which is the width of an A4 sheet and the length of an A2 - in other words half an A2 sheet! This is a pleasing aspect ratio for a panorama. Fotospeed have selected six of their favourite papers for the format and we tested the boxed set of four of each, plus a thoughtful A4 of each for profiling purposes.

The surfaces are in the table on the left.

Testing
When it came down to it we could not resist using the spare A4 sheet to make a profile, at least it provided a solid, consistent baseline for the testing. Our database of Fotospeed papers is a bit of a mix of printers and inks so it was good to collate everything in the same manner. We did look at two of the papers back in Issue 55 of Imagemaker (June 2011) - PF Lustre and Platinum Baryta (and yes, we did cross check the results!). PF Lustre has been updated since that time.

For the record we used the Epson 4900 printer with its HDR ink set, i1 Publish for profiling off a 400-patch target using Quality setting, USFAP for the art versions and PGPP 250 for the others. We printed the HiGAM audit target for analysis, along with a monochrome using the Epson ABW driver. To complete the series we printed a panorama containing very rich blues on each surface using the bespoke profiles.

Printing
The printing workflow depends greatly upon your printer. If this has a roll feed you can perhaps pretend that you are using that roll feed. In order to use the required 'Ultra Smooth Fine Art Paper' media setting, we were forced to use the manual front loader and this would probably also be the route of choice for an Epson 3800/3880. There is an argument to say that if you are printing, say, a limited edition of these pans then doubling up onto an A2 print would be clever, but this assumes something at least as big as the Epson 3880. The paper will fit all A4 printers.

You also need to set up a 'User Defined Paper Size'. This can be a bit daunting, but if you save a preset then you only have to do it the one time.

The Surfaces
The six media are a good mix to cover all tastes and applications. If it is a fine art limited edition then the choice is between Smooth Cotton and Platinum Baryta as both have the characteristics beloved by that sector. For texture, the Platinum Etching is the only choice, but not a bad one for all that; the surface is a light watercolour-like finish. The PF Gloss and Lustre provide bright and punchy prints from the OBA-bearing coatings, the Smooth Pearl more of the same but less pronounced. All three are perfectly adequate for competition and display purposes as it is highly unlikely that a pan will not be frames.



In terms of base tone, Smooth Cotton, Platinum Etching and Platinum Baryta are natural colour, extremely close to neutral indeed (which gives a slightly cream effect in most light). The other three are between 8 and 10 Lab points blue. The fluorescence effect shows up most in the UV booth, the PF pair of papers really jump out of the booth. For monochrome pans, the Platinum Baryta gives that authentic fibrebased air-dried look with good deep blacks. We table our findings and recommendations for ABW settings later. All these media delivered very good metamerism statistics for their class, the art papers being slightly higher (see table).



If reproduction precision is what you are after then the Platinum Baryta is the go-to paper; like all barytas it delivers very high accuracy, high Dmax and an excellent gamut volume. As with metamerism, all the surfaces delivered gamut volumes equal to their peers. The matt papers, Smooth Cotton and Platinum Etching have the typical art paper stats of lower Dmax, lower saturation in the HiGAM patch set and lower gamut volume. This, however, comes with the territory and despite this the pans look quite handsome. The lack of shadow depth shows most in the plots of the grey ramp with the shadows lifting towards the 15-16% mark while the gloss counterparts push all the way down to 3%.

The Audit Data
We huffed and puffed about including this detailed analysis but the measurements apply equally to normal-format paper sizes and so for completeness we have put them in. Overall the Platinum Baryta is the most accurate result, PF Lustre the least accurate. We did slightly better with the previous PF Lustre when we tested it. A clue to the error source lies in the patch plot. Note that the errors are all in the light, pastel shades which suggests that the huge amount of OBAs is affecting things although this does not explain why the PF Gloss is OK. The paper base is too blue for profiling to correct when using small amounts of ink for the lighter shades. We re-ran the analysis of the recent material and obtained a result within about one hundredth of a point. Then we retrieved the legacy material (yes it's sad but we do keep the samples, right back to 2001!) and checked out the measurements. The older material was much less laden with OBAs, delivering four points less on Fluorescence, six points less on Brightness, and three points less on coolness (the Lab b value) all of which would bias the results in favour of the older material. Overall this is no big deal but we do keep as close an eye on things as we can and anomalies drive us crazy!

Monochrome
The monochrome prints highlighted the differences in base tone with the Smooth Cotton, Platinum Etching and Platinum Baryta wearing a distinctly warm tone by comparison. Again this visual effect was a mimic of the measured parameters.

In all instances we used a Dark tone setting but, based on 4% per setting increment, we have indicated the value most likely to deliver a 50% grey accuracy on luminance value at least. We also plotted the grey ramp densities and the colour shift as the tone shifted from no-ink (base paper) to solid black (mainly ink). Everything was well behaved. Note the tones gradually shifting from base white (the paper base tone) to the final inktone which has less variation and is, in fact, closer to neutral.

Real Prints
We made pans of a dusk scene over the Mersey. As you can see this contains very intense blues. There was little to choose between the prints other than the unbrightened papers looking a little creamier and the blues of the brightened papers were a little more intense. Without side-by-side comparisons this might have been difficult to discern. The lighting quality had an influence. Our 5,500°K booth has little UV and did not show the differences as strongly as natural north daylight. The warm, low-energy bulbs under which the composite images were made also highlighted the differences between the brightened and unbrightened papers (see the monchrome tests). Overall the weakness of the blacks in the art papers hardly affected the 'view' of the print at all. In all the comparisons the Smooth Pearl occupied the middle ground, to be expected as its measured parameters were always middle ground also.

OVERALL
This is a good selection of papers with plenty to choose from in terms of materials, tones, weights and costs. For what it is worth our favourites are Platinum Baryta and Platinum Etching, although for a weighty and 'arty' presence of the print in hand the Smooth Cotton would fit the bill nicely. If budget is a constraint then none of the micro-porous coated papers would let you down and our preference would be PF Lustre - it is a very pleasant surface finish and a good all rounder.

Using the trial box is an excellent idea for a beginner and if you have a commercial project in mind a single print sale will recoup all your testing costs with lots to spare (providing you don't go at it the way we did, it took three solid days of testing!). Anything you might learn from the pan papers can readily be transferred to your conventional printing.



Updated 27/04/2026 16:44:22 Last Modified: Monday, 27 April 2026