Many photographers use the seamless paper backgrounds. Myself included. I use black seamless with gels all the time, have a white seamless for location work when I'm away from my Cyclorama, and use different colored seamless paper regularly. Until recently, I was using my location background stands in the studio and would manually roll the paper.

I was recently thinking about this and was thinking about making the huge investment oaf something more permanent in my studio. My experience with the paper drive systems was that they were extremely expensive. I searched for background drives and was quite stunned by what I had found! B&H carries multiple sets of extremely inexpensive solutions for this problem. I decided to test the chain drive waters by purchasing a simple chain drive and bracket set. I mounted it to a studio wall and it works flawlessly. My next purchase will be the autopole expan drive so I can use them at most locations. My old-school background stands will be getting much less use in the future. If I do more portrait work in the future, maybe the motorized background drive set would be a good investment, but until then I'm just relieved that I won't be tearing the edges of the paper and dealing with the ladder every time I want to switch colors or fresh seamless.