RE: Good Ultracote Colors
I second what Mike Gordon said about the one-inch squares: in the air, even pretty close, the black and white becomes a sort of light gray.
As for Monokote, while some users have reported problems with particular colors, I suspect that what's really going on is a quality-control problem, not necessarily a problem with particular colors. A lot of people have said they've had trouble with white Monokote, for instance. That's worked fine for me, but I've had awful results lately with yellow and red: goes on great but then sags like crazy. The bad rolls even smell funny.
(In a day or so, someone will chime in and say the complaining Monokote users just don't know how to apply it. I guess the 20-plus years we got great results with Monokote were just dumb luck, or maybe we suddenly forgot what we'd been doing all those years. Funny, when I use an old roll, it all comes back to me.)