The size of a single drop determines the smallest detail that can be produced in an ink jet system. Drops of as small as three picoliters can be controllably created at the present level of ink jet technology. The final dot quality of a drop can be easily measured by an image analysis system, but the significance of high speed dynamic interactions between paper and ink cannot be determined from the final print quality. Therefore, VTT Information technology has developed several high-speed camera based systems for ink jet paper research.This paper details a new laboratory-scale test environment developed for the measurement of dynamic interactions between paper and ink with drops of a magnitude of under 20 microns. The equipment is based on a commercial piezo-electric desktop printer, a high-speed CCD camera, an optical fibre light source and a PC with control and analysis software. In this environment, the impact, spreading, penetration and drying of very small 3 pl ink drops on the paper samples can be observed on a time scale of milliseconds up to several minutes. This article describes the development and properties of this new environment. In addition, examples of the results produced by this new equipment are given.