Fry's Electronics "GQ" "Great Quality" Photo Glossy Paper

[Nifty]

A few years back I purchased some of the Fry's Electronics "GQ" "Great Quality" Photo Glossy Paper for my Lexmark printer. I couldn't pass up trying 20 sheets for $0.99! Well, let's just say I didn't have a great experience with the "great quality" paper. The ink was pooling on the top of the paper and causing banding / streaking issues.

Yesterday I was cleaning out my paper box and found the paper again. I thought I'd run it through my i860 and see what happened. I put the printer on the photo paper pro glossy setting and was surprised at the result. No pooling, banding or streaking. While the photos looked good, they still weren't as clear as the ones printed on the Canon, Kodak, or Kirkland paper.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the picture I printed (of my cutie Alana) doesn't have very much black / dark areas in it, but where there is some dark area / black it looks like the print is, well, orange peely (is that even a word?). I'll have to run a darker picture to see what happens.

 

[Nifty]

Okay, I ran some more prints and noticed that anything dark / black came out pretty poor on this paper. Very orange peely, probably due to the ink not being able to permeate into the paper very much / at all.

Here is a comparison scan (it looks worse in person).

"Great Quality" paper <----------> Kirkland Photo Paper

 

[Nifty]

Here is a better example of how bad this paper is on my printer:
Canon i860
Photo Glossy Paper setting
Standart print quality setting

Click image for larger picture!

 

[Quick]

I took a look at your test print above and it reminded me of something. I had just purchased an iP4000 and was experimenting wih it. I was curious as to the effect of the various types of paper settings, so I grabbed some cheap, old, more-or-less glossy paper made by Royal and tried all the different settings, printing a test frame obtained with Hamrick's View Print. This is a series of step wedges in CMYKRGB and mixed colors, with a couple of small pictures at the side. The first setting I tried was Plain Paper. This printed a puddled mess not too different from what you have above. The light shades were OK, intense colors were puddled, and black was totally reticulated. Then I tried the setting for the best paper, Photo Paper Pro. This was pretty good, except the darkest grays merged with the black. I tried every other paper setting, with results intermediate between these two. In each case photo quality was set for the maximum, which was #2 for everything except for Photo Paper Pro at #1. I then tried lowering the intensity to try to recover the bottom gray shades. Best was at -10. Every setting on the machine was using too much ink. Next I tried some Ilford Smooth Gloss, starting with the same best setting I had found on the cheap paper. It was also the best setting for the good paper, although the print was far superior to that produced before. My working conclusion that all gloss papers should be first tried out at these settings; I have no idea that they will all work, but it's nomewhere to start.

Now for this GQ paper. It would be interesting to see if it could print without this puddling by using the Photo Paper Pro setting and backing down the intensity as needed to see if the stuff is usable at all.

 

[Nifty]

Quick... very interesting hypothesis! I'm a sucker for a good experiment... especially when it involves stuff I'm trying to use up!

I backed off every color by a factor of 10 from where I already had them (magenta was -5 and pigment black was -13).

The results: While everything was lighter, the color "splotching" was just as bad. This paper reminds me of a wood finishing procedure my sister-in-law applied to some of her wood armoire. She put on a layer of something and then applied a color coat on top. The result was a shrinking and cracking of the color coat making the furniture look rustic, old, and abused... not really what I'm looking for in my prints!

It really looks like this ink has nowhere to go, so it just gets together with it's closest ink buddies to huddle in groups... splotchy, ugly groups!

I guess I could back off the color even more, but I don't think on THIS PAPER it would have much effect. This being said, I'm glad you posted your idea as I'm sure to use it with some of my other paper.

 

[Quick]

Interesting. It sounds like what happened when I accidentally loaded a sheet of the Ilford paper in backwards. That splotched up pretty good; it even wiped right off. Curious, I tried the same sheet with drastically reduced settings. Same thing. Pure plastic. No absorbency. Sounds like your "Great Quality" paper.

By the way, I really appreciate the photo of your daughter. She is a charming young lady.

Bob Quick

 

[Nifty]

Bob,

Thanks for the nice comment on the picture! She's really a sweet girl.

Funny that you should say that about the back side of the paper. Every time I use this stuff I ask myself, "Maybe this is the back side... that's the only thing that could explain such bad results."

The packaging has very specific BOLD instructions that say, "There is a difference between the front side and the back side of the paper. Glossy side of the paper is the printable side."

Well, for the sake of my inkjet buddies, I printed on the back side of the paper....

Ewwwww.... yeah, that's definitely the wrong side!

 

[Inky]

BTW: the new Fuji glossy photo paper is similarly awful, plastic and beading ink. Absolutly impossible to get it to absord. Terrible.

OTOH, it might be good for Epson pigment printers....?

 

[Endmukbud]

Yes i'm agree that we should test each paper....
i usually got my best result when i reduce my black ink up to 90% in the printer setting and the other colours following my calibration. before i got my last result i usually take up the test and calibration about 3 - 4 paper..(even with glossy )
and i want to ask somethin, why everytime i print a photo in a a4 gloss paper with my canon there is always an annoying fingerprint ( similar to ) pattern, but the weird is i didn't got it at 4"X 6" size??

 

[BlasterQ]

I remember having a fingerprint mark on one of my newly printed photo as it came out of my printer. That was weird. Then when I printed another one, it's gone. So what I did is, I hold a new photo paper and put my finger on the area I now my printer will be printing on, and when I printed again, there it was, my fingerprint! So handle your photo papers carefully.