A study for the characteristics of milli-gloss variation of unprinted coated paper and objective measurement tools for it

Gloss uniformity on unprinted coated papers is oftenly called as 'Surface Feeling' in market and roles as a very important criteria when a customer choose a paper. However, there is few researches on this quality so far and even there isn't much knowledge on the characteristics of gloss variation, ie what it is, where it comes from etc. Therefore, there should be a pre-research on its characteristics, factors, measuring method or tools prior to the following development activities. In this paper, we obtained about a dozen of papers including foreign products and measured not only basic properties of them, but also various characteristics related to ununiformity. Our experiments went further to printing, but that area is excluded in this paper. Also, we investigated several instruments for measuring gloss variation by an objective way all over the world and tested with our own samples so that we tried to find out which one is best-correlated with visual appreciation and suggest its results as possible. We found out several things from these experiments including what is difference between good and bad gloss uniformity, the factors of gloss variation, and the results of measurement for gloss variation with instruments.