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Our favourite warmtone fine art paper - with rich & velvety tones. It's also highly eco-friendly making it pretty much perfect in our book!
Made from 90% bamboo fibres and 10% cotton, and with a very smooth surface capable of expressing fine details easily, Hahnemühle Bamboo holds beautifully rich and velvety tones, looks gorgeous and handles & prints well. It really is a must try paper!
The warmer tone and smooth surface suits things like black and white portraiture especially well, but we use this for all sorts of things and it's one of the most popular papers in our own printing service for sure.
Basically - if you're after a fine art smooth matte paper, and your image doesn't need crisp whites, then this should be your go-to choice in our opinion.
Bamboo requires only a third of the water to grow that cotton and other traditional paper fibres need. Also, bamboo does not really have any natural pests, meaning there's no need for chemical pesticides. At best it can grow up to 120cm per day so is a highly productive, renewable resource perfect for paper making.
(Apparently, cotton uses about 3% of farming space in the world, but about 25% of all pesticides and herbicides - and the processing needed for cotton is also vastly less ecologically friendly as well, so the total impact of cotton is quite heavy).
Construction
Fibre Based
Substrate
Bamboo 90%, Cotton 10%
Paper Weight
290 gsm
Surface Texture
Matte, Smooth
White Tone
Warm
Optical Brighteners?
Please note: Specifications are provided as a guide only.
We try very hard to keep these up to date and correct, but if a particular specification is really critical to you, then please double check the specification directly with the manufacturer. Some features may of course have caveats not fully described here.
To get more information about a particular specification, use the arrow to get a 'Specxplanation'.
Papers are constructed in two main ways:
Resin Coated papers are the modern approach. These use less fibre and replace the fibre with resin (a nice name for plastic). This means these papers are cheap, strong and robust, but tend to be less attractive to the touch and accept less ink. They tend to have a clinical appearance and it's hard to write on the back of them. They tend to be popular in the consumer and wedding/portrait markets.
Fibre Based papers are traditional papers made without plastic, using only plant fibres. These tend to accept more ink and have a more attractive appearance, and these are the papers most of our customers favour.
What is the paper base made from?
Possibilities include:
In 'gsm' - grams per square metre.
Not, technically, the same as paper thickness, but obviously correlated. The heft of the paper. European art papers are traditionally generally around the 300gsm mark. Asian papers historically tended to be lighter, 100 to 200 gsm.
Papers with a higher GSM tend to have more opacity, i.e. you see less through them.
What is the surface texture of the paper?
We divide this into six groups. We go by the appearance of the actual paper and not what the manufacturer might label the box with!
What is the white tone of the paper?
These days almost all papers are microporous coated - meaning they'll accept inks from both dye based and pigment printers well.
In years past, some papers had a swellable coating - designed to give a greater life to prints with dye based inks but this approach has fallen out of favour.
What ink type (dye and/or pigments) can you use with the paper?
Also, if using pigment inks and you have a choice, should you use the Matte Black or Photo Black ink?
Does the paper contain chemicals in it to brighten its appearance?
More on this here.
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Note this form is for pre-purchase enquiries, or support enquiries if you have bought this product from us. If you have bought this product from another supplier then please contact that supplier for support.
At Image Science we support what we sell & we really mean that.
You're welcome to call on us for help - how to, technical support, troubleshooting, general tips - for the entire lifetime of the product.
With an unmatched track record for support, for more than 15 years in this industry, you can be sure we're not just a box moving store.