“The world’s first digital Fine Art Inkjet paper made from bamboo fibres combines spiritual photography with environmental friendliness. This natural art paper with its premium inkjet coating guarantees Fine Art prints with a 3-dimensional image depth and is particularly suitable for warm-toned colour and monochrome prints. Its fine soft haptic also lends a tangible fourth dimension to fine art prints.”

Bamboo 290gsm paper is made from 90% bamboo 10% cotton rag. The use of bamboo over wood plup has a significant environmental benifit. Many printmakers will appreciate that bamboo is a more renewable resource than trees. Bamboo, which is actually a tropical grass, grows to maturity in about four years, compared to the 25 to 70 years required for most commercial tree species in the US. About 25% of the plant can be pruned annually over its life span, meaning that bamboo can provide 4 to 5 times the usable biomass of the fastest-growing commercial trees. Hahemnuhle are donating a percentage of each sale to Green Rooster. You can go to the site and vote for where the money goes.

Ok onto the review.

I’ve printed both colour and B&W images of various images. The paper has no OBA and when compared to hahemuhle photorag it has a warm tone which is reflected in the prints. For B&W I used epsons ABW and used ICC profiles for colour prints. The surface of the paper is very slightly textured in an uneven pattern but is smoother than photorag 308gsm.

The paper also curls slightly at the ends but this does not interfere with printing, no head strikes with this paper. I printed using my epson R2400’s loading the paper into the manual paper load tray. using the correct ICC profile I selected the heavy weight matte setting in the epson printer dialogue box.

After printing I was viewing beautiful warm portriat prints on this paper and while the surface is slight textured this does not interfere with the smoothness of the print. The skin tones are fantastic and the prints do have a 3D look to it. The Bamboo paper is just as sharp as other cotton rag papers and it also shows a comparable colour to a favorite paper of mine innova art’s fibaprint white matte.

For B&W prints I do prefering the look of somerset photo satin 300gsm or Hahnemule’s own photorag 308gsm but this is not to say the prints from bamboo are not good but just my own personal preference straight from the printer.  A small amount of adjusment is all that is required to tone the prints exactly to your own tastes and given the choice I would probably choose bamboo over photorag 308 for its extra warmth but again this is down to personal preference as photorag is a stunning paper in it’s own right.

Prices in the UK are roughly £1 per A4, £2 per A3, £2.50 for A3+ so it is well priced compared to other high quality fine art papers plus you are saving the rain forests too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Paper review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.