The Harmon Warmtone Baryta was never a popular paper. Both it and the regular Harmon Baryta scratched and jammed horribly in all of our printers due to the extreme curling of both rolls and sheets. I would average one damaged print for every two I made. Besides that, Harmon was bought out by Hahnemühle. I don't even know why Hah is making the regular high gloss baryta again. I don't think it is going to sell for the same reason it didn't do well before.
As to the Epson Kozo Thin, they never even gave it a chance. They didn't promote it, other than some utube videos that no one I know even saw. And it was never released in North America. It's like they wanted it to fail from the beginning. Awagami has been making great consistently make kozo and various kozo blends for inkjet for 10 years and I use it all the time. Hiromi in LA also has some great Asian papers to choose from and their coating has gotten much better last time I tried it.
Hahnemühle has been super consistent with all their major fine art papers too numerous to mention. They are actually selling more fine art media of high quality than I have time to even test. Canson after they were sold to Legion, is having problems with Rag Photographique but maybe that is temporary. The Platine is fine.
We've got a wide variety of smaller companies trying to grab market share as well, such as Red River, Breathing Color, Lexjet, innova, Moab, Ilford inkjet, etc, . And you've got the big printer companies Canon, HP, and Epson selling rebranded Canson and other good stuff. I choose Hahnemuhle for the most part because almost all of their media not only is always available but I never see any changes. Their quality control is superb over the 16 years I've used it.
John
So with LULA's "Back to print" theme - where do situations like this leave us? When papers you use disappear or change? Last year the whole Harman line was discontinued and as far as I know only the non-warm baryta got a reincarnated version. I've read on this forum about some Canson papers changing significantly and now Kozo's gone. It's not a happy development...