Company wholesale 2ply Color Matboards?

1-ply, 2-ply, 4-ply, 8-ply (and, now, 12-ply) usually refer to cotton rag boards. There are going to be a very limited range of available colors in 2-ply - maybe 4-6 neutral tones, at most.

For most purposes, they won't allow enough clearance between original art and the glazing unless you plan to stack a few of them.
 
My matboard supplier is Valley Moulding. They only carry white in 2ply. I want baby blue, pink or any pastel colors in 2ply. It is so hard to find a supplier.

Huan
 
Please read previous reply.

2-ply is rag. It comes in white, cream, ivory and antique white. That's it. No baby blue, pink or other pastels - at least from Crescent or Bainbridge.
 
I am sure that the paper mill that supplies Crescent or Bainbridge will accomodate your order. The only "kicker" will be the minumin order (probally several hundred thousand dollars for that non-stock paper product)
It will then have to be sent to a matboard company to convert it into what you want.
 
I am using Wizard Da Vinci. That is why I need 2 ply matboards. I print on the matboards with my epson 7600 printer. The 4ply is too thick and I don't know how to configure my printer for 4ply matboards on my epson printer.

For 2 ply, I don't have to configure my printer.
It is much easier. Perhaps I should use poster boards or something else.

Huan
 
Oh wow. I am new in the picture frame business. Now I have to research on how to dry mount. Do I need to buy any dry mount equipment? Hopefully not becuase I already spent a whole lot on my CMC.
I don't have any change to spend on anything else for now.

Huan
 
Domino, is this your website? Framing achievement.com

If it is, as was claimed in a prior post of yours then I am impressed with the web design. However,,, after looking at all the framing choices you offer on your site you must surely offer drymounting and vacuum mounting, don't you?

I can't imagine that you farm out all your work. Search the grumble for vacuum mounting, dry mounting PMA ProSpray or Yes paste. each of those should give you some good threads to pull apart.
 
I think we have a failure to communicate here. Let's forget about 2/4 ply matboard and just consider what the most common mat board thickness is and call it matboard. It's what if you walked into any frame shop and asked for a mat you'd get. Any matboard will feed into your 7600; you don't need to configure it. Now this matboard I'm talking about is, in fact, 4 ply and it's under 1.5mm in thickness and it'll feed into a 7600. Thousands of people are doing just that.

Let me be clear: 4 ply matboard, the common stuff, readily available from any supplier, will feed into a 7600. You might want to change the platten height but I don't think you have to. Forget about 2 ply matboard. Crescent sells matboard with inkjet receptors as does Epson. BTW, you can ony print white or off white matboard. There's got to be white reflected light for color printing to work.
 
There's got to be white reflected light for color printing to work.
Uhh? You should be able to print on almost any substrate. Depending on Dot Gain, Dot Pattern, and Dot density, the color of the substrate will effect the percieved color of the image you are printing, but color in and of itself won't enable or disable your ability to print.
 
Sure, you can print over color but depending on how saturated the color is you get very poor results. Slip some red paper into a color printer and check out the results. The less saturated the color is, the closer it is to white. The whiter the paper, the brighter the color it reflects; moving away from white , the duller the color to the point where there is no color, black. Believe me, I've tried it.
 
Oh wow. Thanks for all the helpful advice. I will definitly use it. TheGrumble site is awesome. Thanks for all the help you have given me :)
I have much to learn and yes I have other companies do work for me becuase I am still in the learning phase.

I have tried to put the 4 ply matboard in my 7600 epson but it does not go through. It won't go through. Perhaps I have to adjust the printer. I tried to adjust the printer to hold the 4ply but it still didn't feed into the printer.

As for the 2ply. It easily feed into the printer with no problems at all.


Huan
 
Warren,

I ran the Eastman Kodak Color Management Systems development for a number of years.

I accept that your experiments and results with the color of the substrates you used are empirically correct.

I guess it is your phraseology that bothers me. It isn't that the paper has to "reflect light." If you used a very dark paper for instance that had a different "dot gain" and a different ink, then the "ink" might "sit on the paper" instead of soaking it in. Since I did not observe your experiment, I can't say precisely which component could or should be adjusted, but there are ways to print very bright images on dark, various color backgrounds.

It is the ink, or dye, or coloring agent that needs to "reflect the light" not the paper. Thus, the key is creating a printing pattern that yields the desired reflection results. Again, this is impacted by the "dot gain" (how much the printing soaks into the substrate) and the dot pattern (where and how big the printed dots are).

I fully accept that given the material and inks you had available your results with darker colors was unacceptable. But, a knowledgable printer or graphics house could probably help you achieve different results.
 
Cliff, I don't want to seem overly argumentitive but....


Here's how printing works which I learned over 40 years ago in high school print shop. We all know that if we print with black ink on white paper we'll get black lines on the paper; we also know that if instead of using lines, we use dots, we can print various shades of gray depending on how close the dots are to each other and how small they are. With shades of gray, we can print half tones, photorealistic pictures on white paper. However, if we try the same thing on black paper (the opposite of white) we get essentially nothing.

But how to print color on paper, a thorny problem? There are really two color systems I'm familiar with, transmitted light and reflected light. Transmitted light comes from the sun, tv screens, movie projectors, light bulbs. It's composed of red green and blue light. From those three primaries, we can see the whole spectrum of color. But because color on paper is produced by reflected light, these colors don't really work and won't produce a full sprectum. We could print on paper using an infinite number if inks to correspond to an infinite number of colors but that's impossible so instead we rely on the *absorbtive* nature of only three colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow, to create a full sprectum of reflected light from white paper. When you see red paper (or red anything, for that matter), it's not red ink but rather a combination of magenta and yellow inks which, and here is the counter intuitive trick, *absorb* all the transmitted blue and green spectrum and allow only the red to be reflected from the paper. If we see green paper it's because the paper is covered with yellow and cyan ink that *absorb* all the red and blue transmitted light and allow only the green to be reflected. You can figure out what happens when you see only blue. Inks absorb color; they don't reflect it. That's the job of the white paper.

The point being that in order to print color, there has to be a white (something that reflects red, green, and blue transmitted light) surface to begin with. Sure, as I mentioned, you can print on colored paper (a paper already covered with some combination of cyan, magenta and yellow) but the results will be poor and the gamut will be very limited. BTW, black paper is covered with equal amounts of cyan, magenta and yellow which *absorb* all the red, green and blue transmitted light. In order to print on black paper, you have to make it white first so it can reflect transmitted light. In reality, equal amounts of cyan, magenta, and yellow don't really absorb all transmitted light (the pigments or dyes are imperfect) and, hence, black ink (being composed of unequal amounts of cyan, magenta and yellow) is used in printing color.

Most of the color we "see" is reflected and is the result of colors from transmitted light (close to pure white) being absorbed by whatever the pure white light (composed of equal amounts of red, blue and green) strikes. When we see something as white, none of the primary transmitted colors are being absorbed and close to pure light is reflected. So white paper isn't so much "white" as it is a good reflector of the three primaries. You need to begin with a good "reflector" to print good color.

You'll notice that dot gain (really only the ability of paper to absorb ink) doesn't come into this discussion at all. The greater the ability of paper to absorb ink, the higher its dot gain and the poorer its ability to display fine detail. Newsprint has a very high dot gain, coated glossy paper has a very low dot gain. In really fine gliclee printing, dot gain is mostly irrelevant since the printing is very close to continuous tone (no dithering, no dots to be seen). Well, of course, there is dithering but its of a much finer order than what we get in lithography. The early Iris giclees actually are continuous tone with no dithering nor dots. The piezo electric heads on today's high quality ink jet printers produce dots so small that for practical purposes they don't exist: continuous tone as a limit is approached. Dot gain,dot density and dithering patterns have nothing to do with perceived color, only with percieved sharpness. The more dots, the fancier the dithering, the closer the print looks to continuous tone, the finer the detail produced.
 
Ooops, I almost forgot, I'd like to think that I'm a knowledgable printer as I get a portion of my living from printing. I also provide a very good pre press service to numerous very picky artists who seem to think I'm pretty good at color work.
 
Huan, there's something wrong here. I've got a 7600, a 9600 and a 10000 right here and I just fed a sheet of matboard (4 ply) into each of them with no trouble. Your problem may be with reading english. On the 7600, you open the paper release lever (do you know what that is?), open the lower plastic paper cover so that a tit on in gets in the path of the matboard, insert the matboard exactly as you would a sheet of paper until it encounters to the afor mentioned tit on the lower plastic cover, make sure the matboard is straight, close the paper release lever, close the lower cover, and Bob's your uncle! It's really that simple. It Takes less than 30 seconds. I've done it hundreds of times. Heck, I've seen the Wizard reps do it at trade shows in front of hundreds of people.

Exactly what happens when you do this?
 
Warren, I will try it again and will let you know what happens. I will also post pictures for you to view how I do it. It would be awesome if I could print on 4ply matboards.

Epson ink cost over $500 for my printer so I prefer not to use too much background color. If I have a pink mat and print on it then it would be best in terms of cost savings. I will have to trial and error for different colors.
 
I actually looked at the Da Vinci system when Wizard was selling the whole thing - hardware and software. My understanding was that it would print on 4-ply or standard thickness matboard. I wouldn't have given it a second look if it was limited to 2-ply.

BTW, for roughly the same price, I bought a Mat Maestro CMC. Funny how things turn out sometimes.
 
Whoa. The 4ply mat works on my printer. You are the man Warren. You the man, Warren! I didn't lift the lever before so the 4 ply wasn't feeding. Now I lift the lever and close it. The printer then is able to feed it without a problem. Very nice.
 
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