What double-sided ink jet paper is best for printing fine-art photo books at home?

Question

I am planning to print my own photo books of my landscape and wildlife photography. I have a Canon PIXMA Pro9500 II pigment inkjet printer, and I have spent an extensive amount of time working with fine art papers (namely various photo-rag and other fully natural papers from Hahnemuhle, Museo, and Moab). I have not spent much time working with luster, gloss, or semi-gloss papers, and never spent any time working with double-sided papers.

I started a search, however most of them come up with the cheaper off-brand papers intended for the general home consumer market. I am curious if anyone has done any work printing fine-art photo books at home, especially on larger formats like 11x17 or 13x19. As far as specific questions go about the paper itself:

• What type of paper works best for a photo book?
  • Some kind of ultra smooth semi gloss/luster?
  • Are natural fine-art papers viable for a book?
• Are there any brands that make double-sided fine-art paper for inkjets up to 13x19" (A3+) size?
• How is the gamut and dmax of such papers if they exist?
• Do such papers work well with pigment inks like Canon Lucia or Epson UltraChrome?

Answer

Stick with what you know.

"Fine art" papers are lousy for production books (they tend to show signs of handling too quickly), but then inkjet prints in general are going to suffer from the same sorts of problems (a single slightly damp fingerprint will ruin the print). Take it as read that the book(s) you will be producing yourself are going to be getting the white glove treatment.

If you were getting the book printed in the normal way for a fine art book (on an offset litho press using hexachrome or a 12-colour process screen at around 200 lines), the printer would use a heavily-coated paper and probably do a varnish hit, leaving a glossy page. That's mostly done to achieve a large contrast range (the varnish helps considerably with the D_max). If your printing process gives you what you want with a fine art paper, then you probably won't like the "same" print done on a luster/gloss paper -- the character of the tonality will be different in subtle ways even if you spend a lot of time, paper and ink calibrating a new paper profile. It's sort of like trying to paint the "same" picture using oils for one and acrylics for the other. If your "real" prints are the result of an end-to-end previsualisation process that includes fine art paper, then a glossy book wouldn't really be representative of your work.

That said, Moab, Canson and Crane (Museo) all make at least one double-sided 13x19" rag paper. (If Hahnemuhle does too, I couldn't find it.) If you can't find them anywhere handier to you, Vistek (which is sort of the pro photo Mecca here in Toronto) carries all of them; if nothing else, you can use that evidence to convince your local retailer that the stuff does, indeed, exist.

Check more discussion of this question.