articles/Paper/fotospeed-panorama-paper-page1

Paper Chase - Fotospeed Panorama Paper - part 1 of 1 2 3 4

by Mike McNamee Published 10/04/2015

Panoramas are a good business item. They are very acceptable as gifts and have the advantage that non-photographers cannot easily make or print them thus adding perceived value - they also look handsome on most walls and always generate a lot of viewer interest. With a two- or three-inch matt all round they look reasonably sumptuous without costing eye-watering amounts to have framed.

Making such a pan is straightforward these days as Photoshop, Elements and the like will stitch them nicely. The image used as an example here is a seven-frame stitch using portrait format on a DSLR. This of course gives tons of pixels for a 24-inch print, the file size was 270MB and the effective resolution was more than 700ppi - plenty to spare then!

The advantage of the Fotospeed papers is convenience. While you can use roll papers or slice up an A2, that may provide more material than you want. Buy the sample boxed set and you should be able to make your money many times over and have somewhere to store the spares. The Fotospeed Panoramic Test Pack at £29.95 shows a 30% saving and in addition if the 24 sheets were bought separately you would need to buy six packs (3 Art papers and 3 Photo Quality papers) of 25 sheets to find the finish you are after.

These papers were introduced in 2014 but this is our first time to profile and print on some of them. The pan format is 210mm x 594mm which is the width of an A4 sheet and the length of an A2 - in other words half an A2 sheet! This is a pleasing aspect ratio for a panorama. Fotospeed have selected six of their favourite papers for the format and we tested the boxed set of four of each, plus a thoughtful A4 of each for profiling purposes.

The surfaces are in the table on the left.

• Paper Chase - Fotospeed Panorama Paper page 1
  
• Paper Chase - Fotospeed Panorama Paper page 2
  
• Paper Chase - Fotospeed Panorama Paper page 3
  
• Paper Chase - Fotospeed Panorama Paper page 4
  

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