Tal Media and Films for Wide format.Dozens of companies offer media for wide format printers. Overall several hundred different variations of media exist for wide format printers. The first-time user gets bewildered easily. Thus for the year 2003 FLAAR will tackle evaluating media for wide format printers. It's a tough assignment because not even trade magazines write in-depth articles on the reality of media. We are initiating our program on wide format media by opening a new evaluation center at a large state university. Just as soon as this is all set up we will announce all the details. In mid-January FLAAR initiated a long term evaluation of the new UV pigmented inks for the Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 5000ps printer. TAL kindly provided several rolls of 36" media for this evaluation. After the first three days we realized the tests would need to take longer than we initially anticipated, so we decided to move the evaluation test site from California to the university in the midwest. As a result the report will be delayed a month or so, but in the meantime we wanted to introduce TAL papers and films. We have seen their booth at trade shows both in the USA and in Germany. So we moved our evaluation center to Bowling Green State University. We used a nice polyester media from TAL for the UV inks on the HP 5000ps. We liked the polyester very much because it hangs well. Photo paper gets kinks in it which ruins the surface. When you move the media from the printer to the sorting table that alone can put kinks in most photo paper, ruining a $300 print. But with fabric you can move it around and it holds up just fine.
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