Originally Posted by
Oren Grad
Compared to prints on a glossy-surface commercial silver paper, printing on art papers via "alternative processes" such as platinum/palladium throws away some information from the negative in return for other attributes that are desired. Each type of print can be very beautiful in its own way, but they are different.
Ditto re paulr's point about contact size inkjet prints being "better" than silver contact prints. When printing in inkjet one can use sharpening and other digital post-processing tools to emphasize certain properties of an image that one finds appealing. But it's still a different medium. Anyone may legitimately prefer one or the other, or enjoy both.
As a general rule, scanning throws away information from the original capture, just like enlarging does. Printing - even contact printing - throws away information from the original capture, too, but printing on a paper with a textured surface throws away more information than printing on a glossy surface. How much information is lost depends on the particulars - if the original capture is crude enough, for example, the loss of information may be immaterial. In any case, whether it matters depends on one's taste in print character, and on how closely and how critically one likes to view prints.
I think trying to reach a conclusion about which print medium or workflow is "better" in some all-encompassing, objective sense is futile. All of these techniques, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, can be used to make prints that are technically impressive and esthetically expressive. But they look and feel different. You need to figure out which "look and feel" appeals to you. You can do this only by looking at actual prints, not by reading about them or by comparing specifications like nominal output resolution or Dmax, which are uninformative or even misleading when considered in isolation.
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