Some months after the introduction of the Surecolor P-series printers, Epson revamped their line of high quality fine-art papers. The Legacy line of papers fills in some perceived gaps in their lineup that were perhaps being filled by third-party papers rather than their own. There are four new papers in this line; all are either completely OBA free, or make only limited use of these Optical Brightening Agents. As a result, these papers have very high archival properties. Of the four, I have been working exclusively with the Legacy Baryta for some time now and can offer some impressions.
Image quality
This is paper contains only modest amount of Optical Brightening Agents and because of this it has a brighter white surface tone than the others in the line-up. Up until now, my go-to papers for high quality prints have been a mix of Ilford Gold Fibre Silk, Canson Baryta Photographique or Epson Exhibition Fiber (although for some time now I have been working almost exclusively with Exhibition Fiber. The Legacy Baryta meets or somewhat exceeds the total colour gamut of these papers, but reproduces a noticeably deeper black. Comparing the profiles for each these papers using Chromix Color Think 3-D graphing software bears this impression out. The ability to reproduce deeper blacks translates into richer and deeper more subtle tonality in prints. Using the Outback Photo Printer Test image (reproduced below and available here; scroll to near the bottom to download the 40 Mb .TIF file), when printed on my P800 using the standard Epson profile for this printer and paper combination, I see very smooth tonal gradations in the grey-scale and color ramps Skin tones are pretty much spot on, reds are reproduced cleanly with little evidence of blocking up. It also exhibits excellent differentiation and neutrality in the darkest shadows.
Having printed many images with this paper, my subjective impression is that in general colours appear richer, with greater differentiation of subtle tonal differences than the papers I have used in the past. While it may not by immediately evident in the small jpeg below, the image contains a wide range of subtle variations in the blues and blue-green tones in the ocean water; these appear richer and have subjectively greater purity than with other papers. At the other end of the tonal scale, the beach pebbles are reproduced with all the rich shadow detail visible in the original image. Also of note, in contrast with other papers like Exhibition Fiber, Legacy Baryta required virtually no soft-proofing adjustments to match the monitor image with this paper. This is extraordinary. Soft-proof adjustments are virtually always needed to produce a print matching my expectations: a testament to both the quality of the paper and the profile Epson provides for the P800.
Feel and Handling
The paper has an exceptionally smooth finish, much smoother than the subtle “tooth” of Exhibition Fibre. This is a luster surface paper with a subtle and very uniform sheen, however it shows much less tendency to reflect hotspots from the ambient illumination than other luster papers. The most pleasant surprise with Legacy Baryta was this: it lies flat! Exhibition fiber (and other papers I have used) has a tendency to curl across the short dimension. When fed into a printer like the P800 the left and right edges of the paper lift slightly, at times causing the print head to strike the edges as it passes over them on each back and forth pass of the head. This can be mitigated to some degree by widening the platen gap in the printer, but it is not always possible to eliminate this entirely. Head strikes are not a good thing at the best of times; Legacy Baryta virtually eliminates this as a possibility. Legacy Baryta is a high quality fine-art paper, and priced accordingly; you will likely not want to use this for every-day work prints. However, If you are searching for a paper with an extremely wide-gamut, deep blacks and excellent archival properties Legacy Baryta is definitely worth trying.
