The Complete Guide To Printer Paper: Know What You Are Buying

Grab the wrong pack of paper and you will know about it within a page: ink bleeding through to the other side, colours looking flat instead of vivid, or a glossy sheet jamming halfway through a laser printer. In fact, printer paper is not one product. It is dozens of them, each built for a different job, and picking the right one changes how your printouts look and how reliably your printer runs.

This guide covers every factor that separates one pack of paper from another: type, weight, size, colour, texture and the material it is made from. By the end you will know exactly what to look for next time you are standing in front of a shelf (or a dropdown menu) full of options.

Key Sections

• Types Of Printer Paper Explained
• Paper Weight (GSM) Explained
• Printer Paper Sizes: A Guide To A4, A3 And Beyond
• Paper Colour And Brightness
• Paper Texture And Finish: Matte, Glossy, Satin And More
• Paper Material: What Is Printer Paper Made From
• Inkjet Vs Laser Paper: Does It Matter Which You Use
• How To Choose The Right Paper For The Job
• Frequently Asked Questions

Types Of Printer Paper Explained

Manufacturers build paper around a specific job, and the label on the pack usually tells you which one. Here are the types you will come across most often.

Plain Or Copier Paper

This is the paper already sitting in most home and office printer trays. It typically weighs 75-90gsm, has a smooth uncoated finish, and handles everyday text documents, drafts and internal memos without fuss. Indeed, it is cheap, it is everywhere, and for a document nobody outside the building will see, it is usually all you need.

Inkjet Paper

Inkjet paper carries a light coating that helps it absorb liquid ink quickly, which stops colours bleeding into each other at the edges of text and images. Standard copier paper works fine in an inkjet printer for basic documents. However, anything with colour, graphics or double-sided printing benefits from paper built specifically for the process.

Laser Paper

Laser and LED printers fuse toner to the page using heat, so laser paper is engineered to pass through that process without curling, shrinking or scorching. It also tends to sit at a higher brightness than standard copier paper, which gives black text more contrast. In particular, using glossy inkjet photo paper in a laser printer is a common mistake, since the heated fuser can melt certain coatings and damage the printer.

Photo Paper

Photo paper is heavier (typically 180-300gsm or more) and coated to reproduce colour accurately and hold fine detail. Additionally, it comes in glossy, satin and matte finishes, covered in more detail below, and is designed almost exclusively for inkjet printers rather than laser.

Cardstock

Cardstock sits at 160gsm and above, right up to 350gsm for premium stock. It is the choice for business cards, greeting cards, invitations and menus, where a document needs to feel substantial rather than flop over when you pick it up. Of course, check your printer’s specifications before loading anything above 200gsm, since not every tray and roller mechanism is built to feed it.

Labels And Sticker Paper

Sold in A4 sheets with a peel-off adhesive backing, label paper works with most home and office printers as long as you select the correct paper type in your print settings. Furthermore, it covers everything from address labels to product stickers and simple craft projects.

Recycled Paper

Made from post-consumer waste rather than virgin wood pulp, recycled paper has become a mainstream choice rather than a niche one. Meanwhile, quality has improved enormously over the past decade, and a good 80gsm recycled ream performs almost identically to standard copier paper for everyday office printing.

Specialist Paper

A handful of jobs need something more unusual. For instance, iron-on transfer paper lets you move a printed design onto fabric for t-shirts or tote bags. Tracing and transparency paper is used for overhead projector slides and technical overlays. Wide-format rolls feed large-format printers producing posters, banners and architectural drawings. None of these are everyday purchases, but it is worth knowing they exist before you try to force a standard printer into a job it was never built for.

Paper Weight (GSM) Explained

GSM stands for grams per square metre. It is a measurement of exactly one square metre of the paper, weighed on a set of scales, regardless of the sheet’s actual size. The number tells you how thick and heavy the paper feels, and it is the single most useful spec on any pack.

In fact, higher GSM means thicker, heavier, more durable paper. It also means a stiffer sheet that resists show-through when you print on both sides. Meanwhile, lower GSM paper is thinner, lighter and cheaper, but more prone to curling, jamming or letting ink bleed through to the reverse side.

Before loading anything above 160gsm, check your printer’s manual. Otherwise, not every consumer inkjet or laser printer can pull heavy card through its rollers, and forcing it usually ends in a jam rather than a good result.

Printer Paper Sizes: A Guide To A4, A3 And Beyond

Of every paper size in this guide, A-series sizes are the ones you already know without realising it. They are the most widely used sizes in the world, and also the easiest to tell apart, because the whole range simply counts up and down in a single sequence: A1 is the largest sheet in everyday use, A10 the smallest, and everything else sits somewhere in between.

The UK and most of the world use the ISO 216 system, built around the A-series. Each size is exactly half the area of the one before it, so two A5 sheets side by side make one A4 sheet, and two A4 sheets make one A3 sheet. Indeed, it is a genuinely elegant system once you see the pattern, and it is why A4 always looks the same shape whether you are holding a full sheet or a folded leaflet.

A4

A4 (210 x 297mm) is the size you will meet more than any other. It sits in almost every printer tray, photocopier and stationery cupboard in the country, comes in every weight and finish covered elsewhere in this guide, and covers everything from a quick internal memo to a printed CV. In fact, if a printer only supports one sheet size out of the box, it is almost always this one.

A3

A3 (297 x 420mm) is exactly double the area of A4, the equivalent of two A4 sheets joined along their long edge. That extra space suits spreadsheets with a lot of columns, detailed diagrams, and posters that need to be read from across a room. Additionally, most A3-capable printers and multifunction devices print A4 just as well, so choosing one gives you flexibility rather than committing you to the larger size, and the faster print engines often fitted to A3 machines are a genuine bonus for busy offices.

A1 And A2

Moving up from A3, A2 (420 x 594mm) and A1 (594 x 841mm) are built for material meant to be seen from a distance rather than held in the hand: posters, architectural drawings, large charts and banner-style signage. Home and office printers do not handle these sizes directly. Instead, they are the domain of wide-format or plotter-style printers, or a print shop that can output onto oversized stock, so unless you need A1 or A2 prints regularly, it rarely makes sense to buy a dedicated machine for them.

SRA Sizes And SRA3

SRA stands for “Supplementary Raw Format A”, and despite the name it sits outside the everyday A-series entirely. It is a set of oversized sheet sizes used in commercial and digital print production, where each SRA size is made deliberately larger than its equivalent A-series size. In particular, that extra margin exists on purpose, to leave room for bleed (ink printed slightly past the edge of the design), grip (the strip a printing press uses to pull the sheet through) and trimming once printing is finished.

SRA3 (320 x 450mm) is by far the most common size in the range, and it sits just above A3 for exactly this reason: a full-bleed A3 design prints onto an SRA3 sheet, then gets trimmed down to the finished A3 size afterwards. Consequently, office and light-commercial printers that advertise SRA3 support are aimed at users producing brochures, flyers or marketing materials with edge-to-edge colour, rather than everyday A4 paperwork.

B Paper Sizes

Indeed, B-series paper sits alongside the A-series in the same ISO 216 standard, though it rarely turns up on an average office shelf. Where the A-series is built so that A0 has an area of exactly one square metre, each B-series size instead sits between two consecutive A sizes, which is why a B-series sheet always looks a little larger than the nearest A size. In practice, B-series paper shows up in items that do not fit neatly into a ring binder: passports, some hardback book formats, and large-format posters, wall charts and display graphics, where B0 or B1 substrates give a bit more room to work with than A0 or A1.

Common US Paper Sizes

Of course, away from the office, North America uses an entirely different system built on inches rather than a folding ratio, which is why US paper does not scale neatly the way A-series paper does.

C Paper Size For Envelopes

Envelopes follow their own C-series, sized deliberately slightly larger than the matching A-series sheet so the paper slides in without folding awkwardly. A C4 envelope (229 x 324mm) takes a flat A4 sheet. For instance, a C5 envelope (162 x 229mm) takes an A4 sheet folded once in half. A C6 envelope (114 x 162mm) takes an A4 sheet folded in quarters, or a flat A6 sheet.

Paper Colour And Brightness

White is the default for good reason: it offers the highest contrast for black text and does not compete with printed colours. But “white” is not one shade, and the brightness rating on the pack tells you how white it actually is.

Brightness is measured on a scale, with most everyday office paper sitting at 80-90. Push above 90 and text looks sharper and colours more vivid. In fact, this is why premium presentation paper and marketing materials often use it. Additionally, some manufacturers quote whiteness using a CIE scale, where anything above 100 has had optical brightening agents added to push it past what raw wood pulp can achieve on its own.

Off-white or ivory paper trades some of that brightness for warmth, and it is a deliberate choice for wedding stationery, certificates and CVs where a slightly softer, more traditional look works better than stark white. Coloured paper, meanwhile, is chosen for visibility and mood rather than professionalism: think flyers, classroom worksheets and colour-coded filing systems.

Paper Texture And Finish: Matte, Glossy, Satin And More

Finish changes how light bounces off the printed page, and it has a bigger effect on the look of colour photographs than almost any other spec on this list.

Matte

Matte paper has no shine. Light does not reflect off it, so there is no glare even under bright office lighting, which makes it the natural choice for text-heavy documents and any photo you want to view at an angle. Colours look slightly more muted than on glossy stock. However, the trade-off is a paper that resists fingerprints and does not draw attention to smudges.

Glossy

Glossy paper has a shiny, reflective coating that boosts colour saturation and makes photographs look vivid and sharp. It is the standard choice for printed photos you plan to frame or hand around. Meanwhile, that same reflective surface picks up fingerprints and glares under direct light, and it is generally unsuitable for laser printers because of the heat involved in fusing toner.

Satin And Silk

Satin (sometimes labelled silk) sits between the two, cutting glare while still giving colour more punch than matte paper manages. In fact, it is a common choice for presentations and brochures where you want photographs to look good without the fingerprint problem that comes with full gloss.

Coated Vs Uncoated

Beyond the named finishes, paper is broadly either coated or uncoated. A coating of clay, latex or another polymer sits on top of the base sheet, sharpening print quality and adding durability, and it is what creates the various glossy, satin and matte options above. Meanwhile, uncoated paper absorbs ink directly into the fibres, giving it a more natural, tactile texture that works well for writing and everyday documents but produces softer, less vibrant colour reproduction.

Paper Material: What Is Printer Paper Made From

Wood pulp accounts for the overwhelming majority of printer paper on the market. In particular, wood chips are broken down into fibres, treated to strip out impurities, then bleached to reach the white shade you expect on the shelf.

Recycled paper takes post-consumer waste through a similar pulping process instead of virgin timber, and modern recycled stock performs close enough to virgin-pulp paper that most offices cannot tell the difference in everyday use. Additionally, a handful of alternative materials exist too: cotton paper, prized for its smooth, durable feel and best known for its use in banknotes; hemp paper, more resistant to yellowing over time and sometimes used for archival documents; and banana paper, made from plant fibre and noticeably tougher and more rigid than standard wood pulp stock. All three cost more than wood pulp paper, largely because none of them benefit from the same economies of scale.

Inkjet Vs Laser Paper: Does It Matter Which You Use

It matters more than most people assume. Inkjet printers spray liquid ink onto the page, so inkjet paper is built to absorb it fast enough to stop smudging and bleed-through, particularly on double-sided prints. Meanwhile, laser printers use heat to fuse dry toner powder to the sheet, so laser paper needs to survive that heat without curling, warping or releasing anything that could damage the fuser unit.

Plain 80gsm copier paper is formulated to work reasonably well in both, which is why it sits in shared office printers without complaint. However, photo paper is the exception that catches people out: a glossy inkjet photo sheet fed through a laser printer risks melting under the fuser’s heat, which can damage rollers that are expensive to replace. Always check the packaging, or your printer’s manual, before feeding anything coated or heavyweight through a laser device.

How To Choose The Right Paper For The Job

With type, weight, size, colour, texture and material all in play, it helps to work backwards from what you are actually printing rather than trying to memorise every spec.

When in doubt, check two things before you buy: your printer’s maximum supported GSM (found in the manual or on the manufacturer’s website), and whether the paper is rated for inkjet, laser, or both. In fact, get those two right and almost everything else on this list becomes a matter of preference rather than compatibility.

Browse the full range of paper on the Printerbase paper category page, or Contact Us if you would like advice on which paper suits your printer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What GSM is standard printer paper?

Most everyday office and home printer paper weighs 75-80gsm. This is the default weight used in copiers, laser printers and inkjets unless the pack specifies otherwise.

Can I use photo paper in a laser printer?

Only if the packaging specifically states it is laser-compatible. Indeed, standard glossy inkjet photo paper has a coating that can melt under a laser printer’s heated fuser, which risks damaging the printer as well as ruining the print.

What is the difference between A4 and Letter size paper?

A4 (210 x 297mm) is the standard across the UK, Europe and most of the world. Letter (8.5 x 11in, or 216 x 279mm) is the US and Canadian equivalent. However, they are close in size but not interchangeable, since A4 is slightly narrower and longer than Letter.

Is recycled printer paper worse quality than standard paper?

Not any more. In fact, modern recycled paper at 80gsm performs almost identically to virgin-pulp paper for everyday office printing, and most people cannot tell the difference by look or feel.

What paper weight should I use for a CV?

Aim for 100-120gsm in white or off-white with a high brightness rating. Indeed, it feels noticeably more substantial than standard 80gsm office paper without tipping into cardstock territory.

Why does my printer jam with thicker paper?

Most home and small-office printers are built around a maximum GSM, often somewhere between 160gsm and 200gsm. Of course, feeding paper heavier than that can jam the rollers or the fuser mechanism. Check your printer’s specifications before buying cardstock or heavy photo paper.

What does opacity mean on a pack of paper?

Opacity measures how much of the printing on one side shows through to the other, rated from 0 (fully transparent) to 100 (fully opaque). Naturally, heavier paper is generally more opaque, which matters most for double-sided printing where show-through would otherwise be a problem.

Need help choosing the right paper for your printer? Contact Us, call 0161 308 5800, or use Live Chat and our team will point you in the right direction.