Oriental G Discontinued per Freestyle

What is "PE" paper? Polyethelene coated, aka RC?

I've been experimenting with Arista Private Reserve, aka Adox MCP 310 and 312, in both glossy and pearl respectively, myself. It is a very nice paper. I'm not sold yet on it versus Ilford MGIV RC. I need to work on these some more. I dislike RC glossy except for contacts where the smoothness helps with showing all detail possible under a loupe, but the Ilford Pearl and Adox/Arista 312 are very nice surfaces, not too much hit to d-max relative to the glossy and they look quite a bit like FB glossy-dried-matte.

Rodger,

Yes, PE is Polyethelene or RC. You discovered 312 Semi-Matte/Pearl. ADOX 312 Pearl has a high surface gloss. Using a color head, 312's light surface texture hids -135 Tri-X grain on 11x14s. The D-max is slightly less. The white base helps prints project through glass. I was always a fiber guy but for wall mounts I am getting converted to ADOX 312 pearl.

It's a nice paper. I like the surface. I've always preferred the pearl types in RC; the glossies are too shiny for B&W for my tastes and the totally matte ones suffer too much from poor d-max (though not as bad as the original Kodak N surface, which was truly horrid back in the early days of RC.)

OTOH, this is the only neutral toned paper that I've seen that I think I prefer untoned to lightly selenium toned. Instead of cooling slightly and getting richer, like even MGIV does, it just gets a bit darker and warmer or at least it looks that way to me.