Over-inking or plain bad paper ? (Epson 3880 - Ilford Heavyweight Matte Paper)

[pompon44]

I'm a happy user of an Epson 3880 since a year and a half. I've been printing mostly using non matte paper so far. I now have a project that I believe would be better on matte paper.

To get used to matte I've purchased packs of small (A4) sheets of affordable papers (Epson Archival Matte and Ilford Heavyweight Matte) and of less-affordable  one (Hahnemühle Photo Rag Duo).

I started my matte journey by trying to build ColorMunki profiles for those papers, and this is when I ran into what I guess is a problem for the Ilford Heavyweight Matte. Some of the target patches (light orange, some greens in particular) look "blotchy" (sorry if that's not an english word... I mean quite non-uniform) and overall there seem to be a lot of ink put on that paper.

I've cross-checked the media type used (Enhanced Matte Paper as recommended by Ilford), tried my own guess (Archival Matte Paper) and the result is about the same.

I'm attaching pictures of the targets (the first of the two-step process) for the 3 papers (the other 2 papers look fine to me, even though the Hahnemuhle is not laying quite flat after printing, which might also indicate there's too much ink ?), hoping that the problem can be seen on screen.

So the question is : is this really over-inking ? Is it is, anything I can do about it ? If it is not, is it just that this Ilford paper is simply a bad one ?

Thanks for any hint,

Regards,

[Alan Goldhammer]

From the posted images, it just looks like a difference in paper texture.  I'm not familiar with the Ilford paper at all and have used the Epson paper extensively for proofing purposes and regularly print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth which is slightly different than the paper you are using.  It also looks like there is a difference in the color rendition with the Ilford paper but that could be because of the paper and nothing else.