Substituting bleached CTMP (BCTMP) for chemical pulps, such as bleached hardwood kraft pulp in many paper grades is in rising demand for reducing cost and improving product performance. In this paper we investigated the effect of substituting aspen BCTMP for hardwood kraft pulp (varying from 10% to 30%)on product performance of light weight coated paper.The results show that the tensile index increases and other strength properties are essentially unchanged as the substitution level increases. With the increased BCTMP substitution level, the surface roughness of base sheets increases slightly, while coating coverage of base sheets is not affected significantly. The increased BCTMP substitution results in an increase in porosity of the base sheets, but does not change the average pore diameter. Increasing BCTMP substitution level leads to a slight decrease in gloss and an increase in surface roughness of the coated paper, however the latter can be compensated by a higher nip load calendering.