Two printer questions

[J1NG]

That's odd. My DP-5000 is listed as 600x600 (4 year old printer) for Dye Sub mode. Which is why the 300x300 looks strange to me. As I'd have have thought that more modern Dye Sub printers would have at least the same, if not slightly greater DPI.

J1NG

[az]

Wombat: Text is different from Photos. Text from a dye-sub would probably not look very good (certainly not laserlike) because of the fixed, and rather coarse raster. But in photos, you have soft changes from one color to another - for this, the dye-subs' ability to produce full-color dots is much more important than pure resolution (just like even a very high resolution laser can't keep up with an inkjet or dye-sub for photos because of its single-colored dots).

AZ

[Dr Mordrid]

HP CP-1700 here. Works nice, and it has available addons for network and for dual-side printing.

Dr. Mordrid

[dshumake]

Dye subs-

The only dye sub printer I have used is the Phaser 440. This printer allows for each dot to have any of 256 levels of intensity for each color CMYK or K for grayscale.

I suspect all dye subs work in the same manner.

lasers.

The dot to be printed is either on or off. Shades are formed by having a different number of dots printed per line.

If each line is 2 pixels wide, then as a printed square there are 5 possible pixel fill patterns; 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. So there is high resolution but very few hues.

A 15 x 15 pixel grid allows for 226 color variations. For a 150 dpi printer there are 10 lines of grayscale allowed. A 600 dpi printer allows for 40 different grayscale levels in an inch.

Now compare to a dye sub printer of 300 dpi and 300 lines. A comparable laser printer will be 4500 dpi.


dshumake

[az]

I take back what I said about all phasers being dry ink - I remember they were when they were still sold by Tektronix, which also had free black ink with the printers. Nowadays the name just seems to be used by Xerox (who bought Tektronix' printers division, IIRC) for their printer lines.

AZ

[Fat Tone]

Update:

Ok, so my Fuji was £100 to repair - way too much!

So, I now have a Kodak CX7530 to replace it. This is complemented by a Kodak Easyshare Printer Dock Plus, which produces 6"x4" prints in 60 seconds. It also comes with a rechargeable battery for the camera (which it recharges, funnily enough ), a memory card slot, a USB port for an external 8in1 card reader and has Idra so you can print from irda devices.

The paper and print cartridge come in a pack with 40 sheets that normally retails for £20, making 50p a sheet. I found them on Simply for £7.99 (20p a sheet!) and have ordered 6 packs so far.

The camera works nicely - AF and WB seem to work perfectly so far. The camera was essentially free using points from a loyalty card, and the printer was £130 delivered. Prints are pretty damn good too, although it does over-egg the blues a little. Overall a pretty good deal IMO.

For the A3 printer I have gone for the Epson 2100S. We'll see how that fares once it gets through the ordering process!

Cheers,

[Dr Mordrid]

One other factor is price.

Judging from the refill kits I've seen locally most of these little photo printers run from $0.30 - $1.00 per 4x6 print depending on the brand of printer. Of course this does not include any amortization of the printers initial cost, which from what I've seen can be anywhere from $150 on up.

In contrast I took a bunch of pics at our family Christmas gathering using the wifes little Olympus 535 3.2mp (not a bad little box), burned the keepers to a CD and took them to SAMS Club (Walmarts warehouse store) for printing while we did some shopping.

All I had to do was put the CD into their photo departments kiosk, select the print sizes for each image and put in my SAMS membership card for ID purposes. It issued me a dated/timed receipt with my customer ID on it (encrypted barcode) and off we went to shop.

No; this is not your normal photo kiosk with an Epson or Canon printer like you see in drug stores. They do their prints with the same Fuji photo gear they use for film on Fuji archival photo paper.

We ordered 30 total prints; 27 4x6's at $0.18 each and 3 10x12's at $1.96 each. Total bill: $10.74

They were done in less than an hour and looked gorgeous.

I believe they do 20x30's for $24 each, but these have to be sent out.

Dr. Mordrid

[SitFlyer]

Walmart / Sam's Club, Costco, and many other stores let you upload pictures to be made into prints.

[Fat Tone]

Store/outside printing can be a good option, depending on volume. The store my camera came from gave me a voucher for 50 in-store, 1 hour prints, and the retailer the printer came from (Pixmania) gave me a voucher for 20 on-line prints.

The main reason I got the Kodak printer was because I wanted a docking station, needed a rechargeable battery etc, and the cost differential from the basic docking station wasn't that great. I also have an Epson 890, which does great prints, but is quite a chore to keep running at keep, and probably costs more to run than this new Kodak.