Are my eyes deceivng me?

[JerryReed]

After using for four years EPSON's CANVAS (not the water resistant one) I acted on the recommendation of a class instructor who advocated for Breathing Color's CHROMATA WHITE canvas.  I bought 3 forty-four inch rolls and at this writing have used two of the three rolls.

These are things that I am sure of.  Later, I will pose a question about which I am uncertain, are my eyes deceiving me?

The BC canvas is much thicker than EPSON's requiring the platten of the EPSON 9800 to be widened from standard past wider to widest to avoid the problem I encountered, which was that after the pigment was laid down the surface would flake off taking the color with it leaving gaps in the image.  This makes the whole giclee worthless.  Big waste of money.  Calls to BC led me to the understanding that the gap must be wider.  No where in the literature is this need described.

Further, the Glamour II product is quite difficult to apply smoothly.  Which resulted in more losses.

Now the part about which I am uncertain and am looking for any other users to weigh in about their experiences:

The color using Image Print's printer profile from COLOR BYTE is just not as vivid as I was getting from the EPSON canvas.  The color is accurate, but just down a notch in vibrancy.  Hard to describe in any other way.  But, an artist whose work I have been doing for some time says that she can see the difference.

So, what do you all think?

Jerry Reed

[marcsitkin]

I think you may have a defective lot of material. We bought a batch of the BC canvas about a year ago(BC 1446 B6F13A1) that we have slowly worked through, with none of the problems you are running into. I've run it on a Roland FJ 500, and an HP Z3100 without a hitch.

We don't varnish our prints. That's something we leave to the "Artiste's". I gave a sample of BC's varnish to one of our fussier artists to try, and he wasn't happy with it, and went back to using Liquitex varnish, which he claims smells like the same material, but applies more easily. He did say that it took him more varnish to finish his print on the BC canvas, but he was very happy with the material and the finished prints.

Have you contacted BC? If so, what did they say?

regards,
marc sitkin