Crave

Ilford Gold Fiber Silk

(Credit: Ilford)

Those who enjoy the beauty of a high-quality black-and-white print will appreciate Ilford's newest member of its Galerie line of inkjet photo papers, the Galerie Gold Fibre Silk. It's a professional-grade inkjet photo paper, with characteristics resembling a traditional fiber-based black-and-white print. Designed for use only with photo inkjet printers that utilize pigment-based inks, such as Epson's UltraChrome or Canon's Lucia inks. Professional photographers and anyone passionate about black-and-white printing, especially all those familiar with fiber prints from a darkroom, will enjoy the look and feel of it.

Ilford Gold Fiber Silk inkjet paper is a traditional baryta (barium sulphate) paper for pigment-based inkjet printers. The baryta is used as a whitener and to hold the emulsion. The baryta-coated layer underneath the ink-receiving layer is equivalent to the structure of traditional fiber photographic base. Gold Fiber Silk is available in sheets and rolls, with sheet sizes ranging from 8.5 by 11 inches up to 17 by 22 inches, and rolls are all 40 feet in length with widths ranging from 17 inches to 50 inches. The paper is 12.5 mil in thickness with a brightness of >95 percent with a 20 percent gloss. I.C.C. profiles are available from Ilford.

Baryta-coated fiber papers have a unique look and feel to them, capable of silky blacks and creamy whites, and have been a standard among the art photography community for years. Gold Fiber Silk offers enhanced definition and extended tonal range, coupled with excellent archival properties. Things that are important to those who are dedicated to black-and-white inkjet printing. Although it excels at black-and-white printing, it has the ability to display a full color range. This allows for various creative techniques such as digital toning or coloring, achieving a sepia- or selenium-toned look, or even a vintage hand-colored look.

Sample prints were made on an Epson R2400 printer. Viewed under a 10x loupe, the sets of prints were extremely sharp, with the Gold Fiber Silk showing excellent overall sharpness. The Gold Fiber Silk had nice dense blacks, as well as seeming to keep a highlight detail very well. These things, along with its warm tone, made it have a rich appearance overall. The Gold Fiber Silk feels good in your hands due to it being fairly thick and the fiber base being less flexible. It has less of a sheen than something like the Epson Premium Luster does, very similar to a traditional fiber-based print.

With it being a professional-grade paper and only working with pigment inks, it is not compatible with all printers. It has the beautiful look and feel of a traditional fiber-based black-and-white paper. It ranges in price from about $40 for 50 8.5- by 11-inch sheets to about $160 for 50 sheets of 17 by 22 inch. It is an excellent paper with a beautiful look and feel that people who love black & white prints will appreciate, a professional quality product, not for everyone due to its price and compatibility.

Today's guest on The 404 Podcast is The Paper Raincoat, a local band of the "experimental rock ambition" genre, as Jeff calls it. Amber Rubarth and Alex Wong have both garnered musical recognition for their individual acts, but only recently came together to form The Paper Raincoat. The release of their first EP, Safe in the Sound, ushered in an international fan following and an impressive list of accomplishments, including the iTunes Indie Artist Spotlight. We're very excited to have them in the studio with us today, and they come bearing instruments for a live acoustic show!

(Credit: The Paper Raincoat)

As we talk to more bands, we're starting to understand the long process of dreaming, writing, playing, and touring with your music in the current music business scene. With outlets like Facebook, Myspace, Last.FM, and many more, artists can easily cast a wide net over an audience that would normally require a major label contract to reach. We talk with The Paper Raincoat about the naming of the band, their recording process, their fantastic DIY album art, and their upcoming tour.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, there are a million places to stream their music live, but the best thing you can do to show your support is to preorder a CD. One-hundred percent of the preorder money will go to printing the record, and you can pick between three packages, the highest of which lands you a limited edition CD, two signed posters, a T-shirt, and a custom USB wristband drive with a personalized video "thank you" and exclusive video content from the band. In the meantime, you can also follow the band on Twitter, attend their CD release party at Joe's Pub in NYC, and download their brand new song, "Right Angles."

EPISODE 434

We couldn't get enough of the Bonch on our 404th episode, so we invite her on today to hang out out with us and chat about the death of Saturday mail, Amy Winehouse, "District 9," and "Paper Heart." And stay tuned till the end for Bonnie's very special announcement! You heard it on The 404 first!

(Credit: Bonnie Cha)

The CNET offices in New York just got a little more exciting, because Bonnie Cha is in The 404 studio to brighten up an otherwise sobering Monday morning! She's only here for one more day, but make sure you listen to the end of the show, because she has a very important announcement!

Our rundowneth overfloweth today with quick little news bytes. The first one is about the U.S. Post Office no longer delivering mail on Saturdays! Calm down, the proposition is still in the infancy stage, but we're wondering if this is a real concern for anyone, or if this could just be another point on the board for THE INTERNET. Nevertheless, we're still going to miss our friendly neighborhood mailpeople who face dogs, weather, fatigue, and a million other things to bring us our daily book of ValuePak coupons.

Next up is a little rumor we've heard from TechRadar about Sony releasing an emotion sensor at tomorrow's GamesCon media conference. We're not sure if this technology will ever actually materialize, but we do know Sony has already patented plans for a gaming console that can be controlled by touch, movement, and even emotions including laughter, boredom, sadness, excitement, and anger. Personally, I can do without a box reading my emotions and affecting my gameplay, but what do you think? Could you get into something like that?

We also talk about "District 9" cleaning up the weekend box office, cocaine content of U.S. currency, and watch as Amy Winehouse has a complete mental breakdown, all on today's snapshot episode!

There's been some buzz this week around Pixel Qi's 3qi display technology, which integrates e-paper attributes with LCD to create a versatile and potentially very energy-efficient screen. The idea is that with a flip of a button you can go from a traditional high-resolution color LCD experience to a low-power black and white mode to an even more energy-efficient e-paper mode that allows you to easily view text in bright sunlight.

This week the technology was demonstrated at Computex in Taiwan, and it seems very impressive. If these types of displays can be produced cost-efficiently, they may revolutionize the notebook and e-reader market. We're probably at least a year away from seeing devices with Pixel Qi's 3qi displays, but at least the company has some promising prototypes to show off and John Ryan, Pixel Qi's COO and vice president of sales of marketing, claims the technology is more mature than you'd think.

Check out the video and feel free to comment on how revolutionary you think this is--or isn't.

Additional reading: PixelQi puts three displays in one

(Source: Techvideoblog.com via Engadget)

From the copier to the can.

(Credit: Nakabayashi)

Never thought I'd see the day when I would be wiping my rear with used copier paper straight from an office machine. Butt seriously, thanks to Japanese ingenuity, this could soon be smart waste management, employed in corporate buildings to recycle all that paper we're guilty of overusing into toilet paper.

There's just one wee catch. Nakabayashi's pricey $95,000 office machine requires a whopping 72kg of discarded paper (159 pounds, or about 1,800 A4 sheets) to churn into just two rolls of (hopefully pliable) loo paper. At least you can now say you've cleaned your behind with your boss' memo.

(Source: Crave Asia via CrunchGear)

GreenPrint World scans print jobs before they hit the page to make them as tree-friendly as possible. It creates a print filter, intercepting your print jobs before they reach the spooler and checking them against a list of preset but adjustable criteria. You can have it grab by the number of lines on a page, for example.

In this First Look video, we'll show you how the program can help you prevent wasteful print jobs--and how it could be even better.

Updated at 12:25 p.m. on Saturday with notes about Hearst's plans to charge for some content online.

It looks as if the e-paper revolution is really about to start.

Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com's new Kindle does for books. The publisher is also planning to put at least some of its online content behind a pay wall, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Soon you'll be able to read magazines and newspapers on an e-reader.

(Credit: Theoprahmag.com)

The e-reader news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey's O, and Cosmopolitan.

It's unclear if the device Hearst has been working on has anything to do with the eReader that Plastic Logic unveiled recently, but its principle seems the same. It's a handheld device used to read digital content, much like the Kindle. The main difference would be that Hearst's e-reader has a much larger size to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.

At the same time as it is developing the device, Hearst is hoping for success in charging for access to at least some of its online content. A pay model for online content, as opposed to an advertising-supported free-access model, is something few publishers have managed to pull off.

Of the leading New York-based papers alone, The New York Times and News Corp.'s The Wall Street Journal have adopted, and backtracked on, both models. Cablevision's Newsday on Thursday also announced that it is implementing a pay-for-access model.

"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day," Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst newspapers, wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Journal.

Certainly, during a time in which papers right and left are folding under economic pressures or otherwise struggling to stay in operation, finding ways to profitably embrace digital media has become imperative for major and minor publishers alike.

"Our cost base is significantly out of line with the revenue available in our business today," Hearst's Swartz concluded, as he noted other advertising initiatives, such as partnering on advertising with real-estate site Zillow and Yahoo, and raising prices for print subscriptions and mobile-phone access to its content. "It is equally inescapable that during good times, our industry developed business practices that were, at best, inefficient."

It's also speculated that Hearst's e-reader is going to be physically flexible and even foldable. The first version would come in black and white, with a later model coming in color and even with video playback capability.

Once implemented, this would change the way newspapers and magazines are published. Instead of getting a print copy, you can just download the newest issues on the e-reader, wirelessly. No printing or paper is involved. Besides the environmental factor, this would cut down about 50 percent of the cost to circulate a periodical.

It's also not clear when you can get the first issue of Cosmopolitan on this new e-reader, but considering the recent launch of the Kindle 2 and the upcoming e-reader from Plastic Logic, Hearst's e-reader will probably be launched in 12 to 18 months.

E-readers are all the rage (this week at least), so it should come as no surprise that another e-reader story is appearing on Crave.

Tech-On reports that Fujitsu is currently conducting a test of the Kindle-like Flepia mobile information terminal in Tokyo at the Termina Kinshicho Fujiya Restaurant.

The test is being conducted as a joint venture between SoftBank Telecom and Mainichi Newspapers.

I get the feeling that in the U.S. they'd have to chain these to the wall.

(Credit: Tech-On)

Customers of the restaurant will be able to use the Flepia's (maybe Flepia is the plural?) to browse newspapers and advertisements wirelessly sent to the terminals.

Accoring to Tech-ON, the companies will verify whether the electronic paper module can be accepted as a terminal for reading newspapers, train schedules and weather reports, and whether the service can promote sales and boost customer satisfaction.

This system uses the "BB Mobile Point" wireless LAN service to deliver the content and to regularly update the content being displayed on the Flepia.

The Flepia uses electricity only when the displayed information is switched. As they don't need to be charged during business hours, there is no need to provide electricity to the table. LCD panel-based terminals, which have been used on tables (in japan), require an electrical supply at the table.

Hopefully someone had the foresight to serve the menu through the service as well. That seems like a given to me, but what do I know about quirky Japanese gizmos?