I did a search for wide color gammut and found this topic. It was interesting to see these comments. When I first got the printer back in May I ordered a bunch of different kinds of paper and this is what I wound up using for all the "poster" type stuff. Even to the point I tell customers its "poster paper". They tend to relate to that more than "Contract proofing paper" - once this old lady's eye's got real big and she said "I have to sign a contract?" LOL! So thats when poster paper became official. I just wish it came in a 42" roll :-)
Thanks for the review on the Baryta as I too am now considering to try this paper.
It always surprises me how widely opinions diverge on the image quality or fine art potential of various papers. What one person loves, someone else trashes as totally unacceptable. Obviously there's no accounting for artistic taste.
I've mapped out color gamuts for many of the fine art papers for the Z3100 using Chromix Colorthink, trying both manufacturer's canned profiles and those I made with the built-in spectro. I have not found any paper with a better gamut than HP's professional satin. Hanhemuhle's photo rag pearl and photo rag Baryta (and HP's Baryte satin for that matter) have a slightly wider gamut in the very light end of the gamut space, but HP pro satin is much better in the shadow regions. Interestingly Hahnemuhle's canned profile for Photo rag baryta maps out to a gamut quite a bit wider than the profile I made with the built-in spectro, but it yields truly awful color with mediocre saturation and a distinct blue color cast. Hahnemuhle Photo rag satin to my surprise has a much, much narrower color gamut than the above papers; yet for many images that don't depend upon saturated gamut, it's a lovely paper.
Then there's the totally subjective issue of surface texture and 'feel'. I really like HP Pro satin's surface texture, which is a very subtle and rather smooth soft gloss. On the other hand, it feels like a piece of plastic in your hand. Harman gloss FB AI has an extremely glossy surface that I really don't like at all, though others like it a lot. Hahnemuhle Photo rag pearl has the classic photo rag surface texture- a subtle eggshell texture that works very well for large prints, but can be a bit too obvious or intrusive for smaller prints. Oddly enough Hahnemuhle Photo rag baryta has a completely different surface, with a semigloss sheen and a fine stipple that strikes me as a nicer variant of Epson's premium luster. All the Hahnemuhle Photo rag variants of course have a wonderful, luxurious hand feel. HP Baryte satin feels a bit flimsier, with a surface texture and gamut that are extremely similar to Hahnemuhle Photo rag pearl, rather than the quite different Photo rag baryta. Crane Museo silver rag, by contrast, has a nice heavy hand feel, and the darkest D-max I've been able to get from the Z3100, but I dislike its surface texture, which is a little reminiscent of photo rag pearl, but with too much "machine made" regularity.
Finally, there's the issue of OBA's (optical brightening agents). Crane silver rag and Hahnemuhle photo rag pearl don't use any, so you won't see your favorite prints shifting color over time. I believe Photo rag baryta doesn't use any, but I'm not sure about that. Harman gloss FB AI and Epson exhibition fiber use a lot, which accounts for their intensely bright paper white.
I think the best approach is to make test prints on a range of candidate papers, and decide which paper, or handful of papers, work best with your images. Then stop messing around and print your work. It's too easy to get bogged down with endless testing and perpetually searching for a mythical perfect paper. "Good enough" is, well, good enough.
