The Bargain Harman For the Prudent Printer

Normally when I receive goods into my studio for illustration I finish taking the pictures and then carefully repackage them for return to the shop. In the case of this box of Harman Crystaljet Lustre RC paper I might just pay them for it and keep it for the production room. It is that good.

I have used a number of Harman papers before - including a box of this type some time ago-and I am impressed with the way the surface takes the ink and with the fidelity that it has to my screen.

I know the colour management and printing experts scoff at this and say that I should be able to minutely adjust the computer, screen, printer, paper, and ink with scientific formulae and careful measurements so that I could get an award-winning panorama on toilet paper. I must put in the hard yards - when the going gets tough the tough get going - and a calibration in time saves nine. Rah rah. I just want to poke a piece of paper in the Epson R3000 and get a good print in one pass. The Harman will let me do this.

I am at a but of a loss to know quite why one paper is a smooth pearl and another a lustre. And another a semi-gloss. They all break up the light a little and they are all pretty forgiving of most of the types of image that you may put on them. If you can't afford to keep racks of paper choices, get one of these and make it do.

The good thing about the harman is the price - under $50 for 100 sheets of A4. If you addicted to test prints and go through a great many evocations before you finally accept her result, this means you get about 40% more shots than with comparable papers from other sources. If, like me, you are sneaky and do your test prints on an A4 by quartering it and passing it through the machine 4 times:

You can go even further. That's Dr. Sun as a statue in Singapore.

But you have to candidly admit that the process of colour printing with the inkjet is nowhere near as arbitrary or confusing as the CYM subtractive printing of the RA 4 chemical era. If you could manage that, you can print on an inkjet with one eye closed and the other reading a novel.

Harman Crystaljet in store right now.