I bet YOUR photo printer couldn't do this! [Olympus P330]
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- In addition to being the oldest dye-sub printer I've ever seen, this one has a wild feature that I hadn't seen before (in combination with the rest of its featureset, that is.) I would have been incredibly irritating if I had
I want to get back to doing more videos that aren't About A Narrative, and this series will be for those: Bits & Pieces. Everything that isn't part of a Big Story.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:20 Dye-sublimation principles & problems
13:45 Photo printer history
17:42 Chassis & interface
22:05 Big secret feature reveal
23:10 Demonstration
27:15 Big secret feature demo
31:46 Conclusion / outro - Věda a technologie
"Dye, sub!" sounds like a threat.
They had to make the submarine yellow somehow
Is there a means to combatting The Broodwich?
I hate/love when my dom says that
kinky 😏
@@Ozhulli had a commercial right before this video with that song and i was literally singing to myself, "we all live in a yellow submarine" as i read your comment lol
My family had this printer and used it for years! You say it's weird but their use case was *perfectly* suited for it: ID pictures. They take several pictures of the client, let them choose which one to print, they select it on the TV and print it. The grid option is for printing many smaller copies of the picture, which is *exactly* what we needed for IDs.
Since viewing it on the TV was slow we usually showed them on the camera screen instead. Only the photographer picked it with the TV. We had many TVs on the shop so it was not really a problem to use one of them for this when we needed it.
Indeed, the manual even refers to using specific 'passport photo paper'.
Fake IDs.. never thought about that but it would be perfect.
@@ohioplayer-bl9em No, real IDs. The kind of photographs they request in the office that make the official government IDs.
yeah, thats what I was going to say - this is perfect for some specific use that didn't materialize for the average consumer.
As soon as you showed the video ports, my first thought was how absolutely amazing I would have thought this was as a kid for games. Photographic proof of whatever super cool secret area or easter egg you managed to find over the weekend would have been the best thing ever. It's probably better for today's forests that I never had one, though...
@@GalacticFoxCat I appreciate the information, but I was just saying I would have wanted it when I was a kid (90s-early 00s). I'm aware there are many more options available today.
Imagine beating a tough Nintendo game and having a printed photograph of the screen to prove it to your friends on the playground. Revolutionary
Another common dye sub I find people unaware of generally: shipping labels. Many are regular thermal, but working in the logistics industry most commercial scale labels are actually thermal transfer (b/w dye sub.) Reason is for a whole skid or something else the paper and print is much more water and abuse resistant.
I believe that is not dye sub. It's called thermal transfer. No sublimation happening.
Ain't that also the working principle of many fax machines?
I recall one at work (quite a while ago that is) had a wax "ink" roll and just that strip to print the stuff. The texture feels a bit weird compared to other printing techniques.
It was quite funny seeing that fax machine do copies tho, it had that functionality and it made them "real time", the exact amount that went inside came outside on the 2nd paper, it finished passing the paper at the same time it spits the copy.
A neat trick with thermal shipping labels is that if you want to obscure your address, just hold a lighter up to it and the heat will turn it black.
@@zaprodk In the same vein that dye sub itself is a misnomer...it's really transferring the dye ink from the roll to the media. When you unload the ink roll from the label printer you get the same negative image version as a photo printer. But the shipping version is more correctly named than the photo version.
@@vwestlife Useful when you need to return a package and want to prevent the original label from being scanned!
I remember a story about a family printing out a group photo and discovering an image of a dead relative in the background and people seemed to think it was proof that ghosts exist. I wonder if this was the explanation? Someone was just cheap and tried to reuse an ink sub reel.
The whole story could have just been made up though, I dont remember actually seeing the photo, just reading the story.
Sounds like an interesting plot device for a mystery.
Seems likely. Spirit photography is almost as old as photography itself. Ask a Mortician has a video on it though it.
you could probably make some really cool aesthetic prints with this. maybe you could layer ghost images a ton
I would have killed for this to save my Mario Paint drawings. I tried taking photos of my TV a couple times and was so disappointed when nothing showed up in the prints.
I recorded some of my animations (and compositions) on VHS. Didn't look great, but it kept me happy.
You were suppose to use your VCR to record things.
Oh man, I never even *thought* of that! I have one of these somewhere, but I don't know where it is or if it still works. If I'd've thought of it at the time, I'd've totally hooked up my SNES and printed my Mario Paint drawings...
@@nb5029 The problem with VHS is that its a lossy recording standard. Most of the home VCRs only recorded 240 lines with less bandwidth than the NTSC signal it was recording, leading to quality loss, color loss and audio loss.
It's not really suited for recording something where you care about the quality being preserved. Like a Mario Paint image would be blurry and have color loss.
If Nintendo could have made this into an affordable accessory for Mario Paint, they would have struck gold.
love hearing him find any possible reason to say "two of them" and immediately getting to see those special little guys again
If I used photo printer ink to print an issue of National Geographic, I could could just buy National Geographic instead.
And it wouldn't be on the super cool paper NatGeo uses (used? haven't handled any copies more recent than 1990.) if you did.
@@LexYeen they just use normal magazine paper now. I have a bunch of editions from the 30s (and earlier) and you're right, that paper is something else, always feels really nice and it isn't fragile at all even after nearly 100 years sitting on a shelf. I absolutely love the way the old covers looked, too. I wish they would bring that back. It made it feel like a real scientific journal and not the pop-science tabloid it is today.
@@tissuepaper9962 Offset printer here (my old occupation) that's because they use a clay/ceramic fill on the paper. It's added to the paper as it goes through the rollers to get the excessive water out of the pulp. Lovely stuff, bitch to print on. It can cause runs and blotches if you don't get the alcohol in the water right on the press.
Always love when I randomly see a CZcams legend in the comments.
Using a photo printer in A4 format is generally expensive as hell. You might get neer the vost of buying a magazine with many pictures if you use third-party ink but probably it still won't be cheaper. If you use OEM ink, it's probably an order of magnitude more expensive. But using a normal inkjet might even be considerably cheaper with 3rd party ink, depending on the relation between text and pictures.
The real magic of those Alps printers was that they can do things in normal printer couldn't do for example they could print White and they could print metallic colors and they are still very highly sought after today for people who print water transfer decals :-)
Probably not so much now that inkjet and laser printable waterslide decal paper is available.
@@greggv8 not really because they still can't print White and they still can't print metallics :-) then again the supplies for the Alps are getting harder to get to
The remaining negative image on the dye-sub sheets also made it a pretty bad security and privacy issue, because it was now trivial to go back and recover images which were printed previously. When these printers were at their peak I had an internship at a national lab and there were always *dire* security warnings about printing classified information on the dye-sub printers.
Thermal film transfer plain paper FAX machines had the same issue. The expended film rolls were a big privacy risk since they contained negative images of every FAX printed.
No. No one thinks this way. Really. Just remember about the kodak Kiosk Printers. It's the same thing as this. Just with a LCD touch screen. Plus, in the old days of film employees of this kind of stores, usually see all the images that were processed with them. Sometimes, makes a personal copy of a "special photo"
@@dandalo I mean, the lab I worked at also didn't let people take classified information to 1-hour photo printers either. This was a very real concern outside of the home consumer photo printing space.
you have the same issue with things like the p-touch label printers.
I saw the paper catch fire and laughed. I’ve done exactly this during my experiments with thermal printers
FYI, an ECP (Enhanced Capability Port) parallel port was actually comparable in speed to USB back then: speeds of anywhere from 1.5 to 20 Mbps were claimed for ECP parallel ports, vs. 1.5 Mbps for USB 1.0 and 12 Mbps for USB 1.1. Parallel was fast enough for webcams, video frame grabbers, scanners, CD-ROM drives, and external hard drives.
Yeah but in practice every parallel printer I ever used was dog slow. Without seeing a printer that actually uses ecp, and I certainly don't remember it ever working, I'm not convinced that any of them ran at those enhanced speeds. I think the only thing I ever saw use those was a scanner, and for everything else I had to put the port back in standard mode.
@@CathodeRayDude I recall using it for lasers and inkjets. Be careful with quoted numbers as parallel ports were often rated in bytes per second while USB is in bits per second. And for output only, ECP isn't needed, basic parallel with interrupts enabled should do the job.
@@CathodeRayDude There is also is laplink that was super common for copying files from laptop to your desktop for example. Used LPT ports on both sides and acted like a peer to peer lan connection
Don't forget the IEEE477 interfaces for scanners and printers during this time!
@@thedopplereffect00 I was specifically aware of its status because I had to turn it off when using anything other than one specific device that supported it. Any time I had it on, other things wouldn't work.
I had an ALPS MD-5000 back in the day!! The picture quality was stunning compared to what else was around, and the ability to print in metallic, put gloss over top on regular paper, print in white on dark paper was fundamentally cool at the time. I can't even remember when I got rid of it, had all kinds of mechanical problems I got tired dealing with and inkjet/laser options were looking better than that fiddly/complicated printer. Now a fond but distant memory.
I was going to comment about the ALPS. The metallic and white ability was awesome.
Loved the gloss cartridge especially. Even with generic, pretty rubbish copy printer paper, you could print a really nice photo.
i had an alps md-something. i recall it having some issues too. still very wasteful for documents.
I had a second hand Alps MD that I found some Citizen Printiva carts for. It was a lower end one that did metallic foil but not the special coatings and I got a pack with black glossy card that looked great with the silver foil and the straight paper path was great for card in general . Sadly got rid of it when we moved as we no longer used anything with parallel ports and drivers would be a pain even if we did.
I remember a review of the model that said there was actually a dye sub kit for it.
This was the printer my parents bought with our first computer system. The quality was way better than ink jet. But at the time I found it annoying due to how long it took to print a color document. It would suck the page back after printing each color sequentially (including black). The upside was that it was water resistant. I had a pet frog that once jumped out of it's aquarium on to my school papers. The ones printed from my ink jet at school were unreadable. But the ones printed at home on the Alps were just wrinkled. (I ended up scanning it back in and re-printing with an OCR scanner). The other interesting thing to note was that you could read text previously printed on the ribbon. Could be a potential security issue.
29:55 - The "puffy prints" were also a thing on Tektronix / Xerox wax-thermal printers. (also called "solid ink" printers, sold under the "Phaser" name.)
Yeah, I remember the university computer terminal room had 1 or 2 of those, with a long queue waiting to use that terminal. So I spent a few hours figuring out how to print my graphs on the B/W lasers printer instead.
Yup, can confirm this raised layers look, esp to be seen edge on. They gave "free" ink little bricks too. Some sort of work around on the refilling laws.
We had one of those in the office when I was on navy shore duty back in the mid 2000s. I always thought it was a unique ink delivery system
There was a large format 11 x 17 inch version I would see at Comdex back in those days. Doesnt clog like ink jets. Tshirt transfers worked.
Wonder if they still have these and or support these
I've been using the Canon CP 4x6 dye sub printers for over a decade. They're great. Ink never dries up or clog, and prints look like old school Fotomat continuous tone prints and dont UV fade like inkjet prints. There is no substitute for home use. Bought my daughter one for xmas last year in fact.
That's an interesting comparison, I picked up one of these Olympus ones at a hamfest for cheap in the aughts. Always that the sort of metallic sheen gravis mentioned made them look very Cibachrome.
@@soupforare researching it a bit, it does indeed seem that if you want ciba/lifo-like result, dye based inks are the ticket. either with these little 4x6 dye subs or for larger format , dye based printers with v high end glossy, non-fibrous photo "paper"
My first memory of seeing and using dye-sub was during a digital photography class at the now defunct Disney Institute circa 1997. I found the whole thing quite fascinating, but the thing that always stuck with me was how the name is based on a misconception and there's no actual sublimation happening at all.
The 3D embossing effect reminds me of the tactile thermal printers used to make printed diagrams for the blind and vision impaired. They use "swell paper" that gets thicker where heat is applied.
Here's something that's gonna blow your mind: in 1997 I had an Fisher Video Printer. Yes it was a dye-sub printer with the same type of cartridges. Good luck finding it. I bought mine (I don't have it anymore, sadly) from a store that had an demo-ex. No one wanted to buy it, but I got a lot of Dye-sub-ink cartridges with it and got it insanely cheap back then, and the store had no clue how to use it. Funny thing is - it looked almost like a VHS cassette player or a regular stereo cassette player by design, and had this little neat flip-open tray to the left where you picked up your printed colour photos. It looked awesome, kind of like polaroids when they came out.
When you say "ink is the biggest cost in printing", it's still insanely cheap, you can get litres of the stuff for pennies. The biggest cost in printing is the process of packaging and selling you the ink in what amounts to precision manufactured replaceable printer parts (cartridges), and the business model where you subsidise someone else's printer with your ink purchase. Well some inks actually are expensive, like controlled size pigment inks which must both pass through the inkjet nozzles without clogging and maintain a stable colloidal suspension, but soluble dye based inks are cheap, and gamut compromises aren't actually a big deal for photo printers like these, so i think the ink here is actually very inexpensive.
Hooking up your photo camera to the TV at the end of the day to review your pictures comfortably after a trip, even at a hotel, was actually pretty common at the time, i used to do this, and all the cameras i test drove in the late 90s that i can think of have the video out feature. And this can just go right in between to get the print, very nice. Conveniently, TVs usually have a front composite input.
Inkjet CISS mod was extremely popular, at least in China where printer sellers would just mod printers for you when they sell you a printer (for free and usually only took them a few minutes). Nowadays though I believe it's much less popular because there are a lot of ink-tank printers that, although the printer itself is 3 times more expensive, giving that ordinary ink cartridges are probably already at half the cost of an ordinary printer, ink-tank ones just seems to be the overall better choice unless you just have to save that extra bit of money. Many ink-tank printer also include extended warranty to push the user just use official ink, or straight up claiming that the set of included ink is sufficient for a whole year in an ordinary home already.
@@FlameRat_YehLon the ink tank printers aren't 3 times more expensive at least in thailand (than mod printers).
@@lasskinn474 It kinda depends. In China I think it's about 350 yuan (which actually would be the cost 10 years ago as well), or no more than 500, for a home inkjet printer, while inktank ones goes for like 1000.
There could also be the factor that non-CISS inkjet printers are phasing out of the market, and therefore except for professional ones, most of them are being put on clearance even without getting announced like so, to make way for inktank ones.
i do find that practically every technology was available 15-30 years before i thought
I was born in 1985 so I was 14 when this came out and remember it. It’s crazy because when I talk at 36 about the things I remember from my childhood people think I’m in my early 50’s and look young for my age. In reality I grew up very poor. And being poor, we used a lot of older technology plus having a father born in the 40’s that was raised by his grandparents that were born in the 1870’s I was taught a lot of old stuff. I can easily relate to you on a lot of your videos! Keep up the good work.
On the subject of early "home" color printers - in high school, my family had the standard home printer - a dot matrix tractor-feed. But one of my friends' dad had bought an early color printer - HP DeskJet 500C. But color ink was expensive. I wanted to print a report for school with some color elements, but he wouldn't let me print the whole thing on his printer - so I printed the text on my dot matrix, then brought the pages over to his house, and laid out just the color parts and printed just those on top of my already-printed pages.
In particular the 500c was a "single cartridge" printer. You could put a black cartridge in it OR the color cart. And then black (text) would be the sum of C/Y/K. Which looked ok-ish for pictures but text was very muddy. So indeed, printing a school report was 'expensive' cause it was not just the color but all the text that used 3 times as much color ink.
I remember trying to explain to customers at circuit city just what a dye sublimation printer was, and why they would want one vs a normal printer at the time - this brings back memories.
I used dye sub until I could no longer get the refills. Incidentally Sony used a four-pass system that placed a clear protective layer on top of the print.
You can (probably should) buy a Canon Selphy today that does the same four-pass print. Price is ok.
those were cool, I remember back in the day when they were on the shelf at Best buy there was a demo set up where someone took a print from one of those and rolled it up and put it in a bottle of water, so there was just this picture chilling out inside a bottle of water on the shelf next to the printer. no idea how often they had to replace that.
I think a friend of mine had that Alps printer in college--either the very model you discuss or a close relative of it. (This would have been about 1999 or 2000 or so.) As I recall, the non-smearing color output was the main selling point for her, and she got a reasonable price on the printer itself. However, she quickly got tired of the slow speed, banding artifacts, and ribbon costs. :-/
Nice video!
Alps had absolutely unique killer feature: there were decent gold, silver and opaque white ribbons, so you could print really fancy things. No other consumer grade printer could ever do that.
@@ermouth That is fancy indeed, makes me wonder if it could be feasibly made with inkjet now, I bet the particle size would be a thing to consider.
Also nowhere near as easy to change between those even if possible.
@@Kalvinjj oh, they exist, but much less shiny compared to Alps
15:21 from my recollection, the largest inconvenience with using glossy photo paper with a common household inkjet was the dry-time and how easily it would smudge. If you wanted to print multiple sheets you'd have to standby ready to pull each one out before the next sheet started and carefully lay it out somewhere to dry (preferably free of dust and hair that would stick and dry to the ink, or any breeze that might flip it over), while also avoiding touching the ink or bending the paper too much.
Even once cured, a little spill can cause the photo to bleed almost immediately, and warm humid environments can make them tacky, so they're not particularly durable either
Could you use a fixative? I'm specifically thinking of the spray fixatives used to protect charcoal and pencil drawings from smudges. Seems like it's not really worth it to print pictures from an inkjet if they won't hold up.
@@tissuepaper9962 When I was regularly printing large inkjet prints we would seal them with adhesive plastic film. There are a variety of different surfaces available.
@@tissuepaper9962 probably, wouldn't be surprised if they're were products specifically formulated for the purpose out there, but that's beyond the scope of my experience
I vaguely recall some brands marketing specialized ink that was supposed to cure faster, set better, and/or provide some other colour quality benefits when used with certain photo papers, as well as a variety of paper types, finishes, and qualities.
Somewhere in the mix I'm sure you could print some decent, durable photos but that photo ink was often 2-3x the cost of standard and the fancier paper could also get pricy, my experience (and most others I assume) has largely been limited to the cheapest glossy paper I could find and w/e ink was already in the printer
Also fading/loongevity, which seems to have been one of the major ways this was marketed - particularly at that time, when people were familiar with the longevity of traditional photos.
@@DoubleMonoLR The big brands were usually ok for longevity, particularly if given a UV protective film. Some of the cheeper copies not so much, but still the UV protective film is always a good idea.
"I have some memories, and I fill in the rest with research." Great line, I'm stealing that for next time...
The textured printing effect, maybe you were thinking of intaglio printing, commonly used on banknotes, postage stamps and the like? That builds up different thicknesses of ink onto the printed surface.
The first colour "printer" that we had at home was actually a plotter that could use different coloured pens. It took until the late 90s before we got our first real colour inkjet printer.
The height difference is also on the Xerox Phaser printers that use heated wax that is being inkjetted onto the paper with a piezoelectric head. Those machines are freaking amazing! We still have one in my local hackerspace, but we ran out of ink (we call the ink soap bars) and it's using a lot of electricity since it needs to keep the ink molten. A power cycle wastes a lot of ink :D
Phasor 340, got one in the storage room, precisely because of the cost of the consumables. The early ones did have a recall for catching fire, the fix was a new heater, and a new thermal cutout plus wiring loom. To install you literally had to strip the printer to a shell, and remove the one side plate, so as to get to the heater that is inside the imaging drum, to remove it and install the upgrade. That was nearly a day of work for the technician, and he had done around 2 dozen of them by the time he came to us.
Yes the wax was expensive, around $100 back in the 1990's for a refill of all 3 wax blocks, and they would last for a month only. You needed 3 blocks in the printer before it would even attempt to initialise, and it would turn one of those bars into a black wax block in the maintenance tray doing the clean and warm up cycle, and then similar during shutdown. Then once a week a clean cycle. Maintenance tray as well another $150, and it had a fixed life of 500 pages, though there I figured out how to reset the counter, and get easily 5000 pages out of it, simply be using a paper clip to hold the plastic pawl of the ratchet back, and wind the plastic flag on a shaft back to the beginning. 1l of silicone oil in the bag, and after this you simply used till that bag was empty, instead of the 50ml they used normally.
Killer brilliant colour, till the paper gets warm and it soaks into it.
@@crazzzme Maybe not an hour, but it feels like an eternity!
@@crazzzme Actually it's more like 10 minutes to warm up. But to move them you do have to give them a solid 30+ minutes to cool off so the wax solidifies.
Used to own one the 8400 from memory with the duplex unit a 20gb hdd and 512mb ram it was Amazing best print quality ever but sold it is it was so expensive to run
@@simonupton-millard Did you turn it off regularly? The ink blocks were not that expensive, but every time you turn them fully off and then power them up, they consume around 1/3 block per color. They’re intended to be left on at all times.
I've seen the "puffiness" on that special thick inkjet "photo" paper that has the glossy surface. Areas that take a lot of ink tend to puff up in the shape of the image. They may have fixed that these days. Dunno, since the companies that make the paper (and ink) have made it uneconomical to actually print off photos that way...
I recall that thickness of color layers from T shirts, even commercially printed ones.
Canon SEPLHY printers work the same way, and they produce exceptional prints for relatively low supply costs. I use one all the time to do pet photos with santa/easter bunny/jack and sally at a rescue.Only drawback is you are limited to one print size, usually 4x6 postcard.
That composite reveal was perfect
We used dye sub for printing proofs back in the day (mid 90's) at a digital prepress agency I worked at. We'd shoot product with a hassleblad with lief back digital (it took R, G, B images separately, about a minute to shoot a single product).
Yup! Been there, done that.
Looking back I'm really glad I've experienced the whole transition from analog to digital
Gen-X
I think those printers were very common in hospitals back in the day. They were connected to xray or ultrasound devices via normal composite video cables. I think I got an old ultrasound picture here somewhere.
Yeah, labs too I bet - would be a super convenient way to get e.g. microscope images for lab notes relatively inexpensively without needing to either book time on the big, expensive, shared microscopes which would be hooked up to a computer system, or attach a film camera to your microscope (which is what you would do for publication quality images)
My memories are of the first real home photo printers being dye-sub. They were expensive, but in the realm of obtainability for prosumer type users. The main problem above initial cost was the per-print consumable cost, which when all added together, just made it a little too much unless you were making money with it.
I once saw one in high school. It moved the paper between the printing steps outside of the printer. It looked really cool seeing every color layer
When I worked at a big box computer store in the 90’s, I would print out personal photos after hours on the Alps Md-5000 demo unit we had set up. Many of those 8x10” photos are still hanging up in my house after 22+ years of being exposed to oxygen, sunlight, and other factors without any appreciable fading. And they still look great for being taken on 2MP digicams and film to Photo CD. The pics lasted longer than the printers or any other tech of that era.
The “embossed” effect reminds me a bit of the prints from Xerox Solid Ink printers, a while back I had an old one that was thrown out. IIRC those basically melt colored wax blocks and distribute the liquid wax onto the paper, pretty cool tech and distinctive looking prints.
The only downside was that you had to decide between terrible ink efficiency or terrible power efficiency as the already liquefied wax in the reservoirs was dumped into a waste container on a full power off and on standby they were heated all the time to not clog up, wasting tons of energy.
My place of work had one of those Xerox "Phaser" solid ink printers more than a decade ago. It produced quite nice color graphics and photos for our marketing team and yes the more dense the color the "thicker" the ink showed.
That "texture" on dye-sub prints seems similar to the effect on colour laser prints, where the gloss-level of the paper is different to the ink/toner layered on top. A tendency to get slightly glossier inked areas than white exposed paper areas, but if you are careful with paper selection (using a bit of trial and error in selecting which brand of semi-gloss paper to use) then it's almost (but not quite) undetectable.
My mind was blown when I went from a tractor feed dot matrix printer to a Canon bubble jet in 1991 or 92. So crisp, yet so tiny. I bought a used laser printer a while after that that produced super clean text, but it caused the lights to dim in my apartment.
I had a Citizen color sub printer for my Amiga 1200 back in the early 90s. It had 4 separate tapes, and you could also print using metallic/shiny color. Pretty unique! And the print quality was insanely good for its time. Citizen licensed the tech from Alps if I remember correctly.
I've only just now realized that ultrasound machine for medical imaging as well as the video monitors that they use for procedures like bronchoscopies all were using dye sublimation printing. I've seen plenty of these still in use today. They print out key moments of the procedure for the medical record or pretty pictures of the baby for their parents to take home.
In 1995, I had a small photo restoration business where I would use Photoshop to fix people's old photos. I invested in a Dye-Sublimation printer so that I could print out the restored photos. I had a Fargo dual-mode printer that used a thermal wax ribbon for draft images and dye-sublimation for the final draft. The thermal wax could print on any standard paper stock, even thicker stocks. The dye-sub mode used only special, expensive photo stock paper from Fargo. It would print up to 12x20". I might still have that printer in the attic somewhere.
The niche but delightful idea of capturing old game footage as retro photos to have them framed is an amazing idea to me. I might have to get one of these solely for that reason XD
I remember being blown away by a similar video printer in 1992 when I was given an unsolicited demo of one (I of course wanted to buy it immediately, but they had already maxed-out my credit card with buying S-VHS equipment). Dye-sub sounds inefficient and wasteful, but I think Polaroid cameras of the 1980s has it beat: a cartridge gave you only 10 shots and even contained a battery to power the camera...
my man CRD❤! he is the best! my 55 years old head learning from his videos. love you dude, keep up your program on your channel the way to go...😊❤😊
I really like how thoroughly you cover things. Keep it up!
I love the passion you have for old tech. Keep being awesome.
The computer shop I worked at in 1996 and 1997 got in a dye-sub printer for a client. The techs (myself included) got to play around with it some so we could make sure that it was going to do what the customer was wanting. It produced some amazing prints.
I have a Tektronix Phaser 480X 300DPI CMYK Tabloid Printer (still working with modern OS thanks to PostScript and Ethernet). It uses dye sublimation as well. The special material in which the dye is sublimated into is Polyester. You can transfer the dye onto any polyester containing t-shirt :-)
I love this channel. It's like Technology Connections but with fewer dad jokes.
I was using a Sony dye-sublimation printer at my job in a commercial video post-production house back in the mid-90s. It was an 8.5x11 printer, and was lovely, but rather expensive!
My dentist's office had a similar Sony dye-sublimation printer (5x7 inches) around the same time. Both were several years before this Olympus printer was released.
The 8.5x11 printer was used to capture stills from 35mm flying spot scanner motion picture film, during the one light and best light colour correction sessions.
The printouts were basically used to show continuity and colour corrector still images for the clients. The dentist used the little printer to grab shots from the micro-video
camera displaying finished fillings, and teeth work for the patients.
Thank you for always putting out unique content its so refreshing to see things reviewed or discussed that no one really talks about. Lots of nostalgia here :D
this is one of my favorite videos of yours! please keep reviewing random tech like this!
This video is great, back when i was getting my A+ certification the book i read briefly mentioned dye-sublimation printers and i never really knew what they were but the term kept kicking around my head, little did i know that i had actually encountered them now multiple times in my career having to setup/support ID card and badging systems
Your topics are always interesting and unique!
My grandmother had this and considering she didn't have a PC for a long time and still barely uses it it was a godsend for getting pictures off her camera.
It's always a great day when you can watch a new CRD vid! Thanks as always for the upload bud!
You somehow bridge the gap that I didn't even know existed between two other youtubers, LGR & Technology Connections. Keep it up. Hope you see this.
I work with a die sub printer. I make DoD IDs, like military IDs, military contractor IDs, military retiree IDs, military dependent IDs, etc. It is the Fargo HDP5000. It works a little differently than the die subs that prints to paper. This one first prints the image to a clear transfer film, 1 pass per color, then it transfers the image from the transfer film to the card, then transfers black for the text to the transfer film, then the card passes through the transfer film again to transfer that text to the card. That's just for the printing. It's also equipped with a flipper, to flip the card for printing on the backside of the card, and then a laminator.
Whoa, that's fascinating. I wonder what the intermediate is for.
@@CathodeRayDude As in why it can't transfer the color images and the black together? I don't know. It seems like it could do it all together, but I guess they have their reasons for it. It also has the option to print YMC in place of K. I never used that feature, but I do kinda wonder if it would cut out that extra pass and print the text together with the images or would it waste a whole section of YMC to print the text separately.
Great video! Thanks! We had a Kodak dye sublimation printer/scanner combo at Fox Photo where I worked in the late 90's. It gave the most accurate color replication when copying old photos. It's drawback was the expense. It was also a bit tricky changing out the dye rolls (for lack of a better term) because if we messed it up that was 50 bucks down the drain. Thankfully our company didn't put the expense on the employee if they screwed up. We also had a larger one at my school and we printed all our digital photography on it. It made beautiful, durable long lasting prints.
Ps, I loved the live event. Especially the faxes. Tried to send one, but not sure if mine went thru cause I was out of ink and couldn't print the fax reports, Lol!
One other use for dye-sub printing is on plastic PVC badges (think the "work badge" many companies use now with barcodes, or RFID chips to unlock office doors etc) - I use one to make name badges for a camp I volunteer for every year. In fact, banks use them now to give you "instant" credit/debit cards as well.
That look on your face at the 0:40 mark, as the printer was printing the photo - priceless.
Umm...what?
In 1999 we had a windows 98 PC in the living room with an hp deskjet 840c printer. It was an inkjet printer and it was the best printer I ever used. I was using it well into 2014 when it finally broke down.
My dad was using his digital camera in those days to take pictures of us as kids and print them on photo paper and frame them. He would use Corel software to remove the background and made it look like we were at the Whitehouse. He was way ahead of his time. He never used film cameras he always said it was easier to get higher quality images on digital without them being blured. He liked that he could see how the photo came out on his computer before printing instead of finding out if they came out ok when you got a roll of film back.
I loved this printer because the cartridges lasted forever! Much longer than modern inkjet printers with those tiny cartridges. Yes the color accuracy was not as good as today but even in 2014 I was getting very good photo prints on regular hp photopaper that I was happy with even by today's standards.
I personally liked it when some of the images on regular paper came out a little damp. It told me it was printing really well and the ink was adhering to the page. I never minded letting it dry for 10 or 15 minutes.
This was actually one of the first inkjet printers that had USB and luckily my dads computer had 2 USB 1.1 ports in the back. So we just used that instead of the included parallel port it was much faster.
I found some new old stocks of this printer and i might order another one. It was the most reliable printer I ever owned and I want another one.
I spent a number of years working on connectivity (mainly printers) on a scope line for one of the big test and measurement companies. Our validation lab had a number of printers, but the nicest ones to use were the dye sub ones. Since we only validated our scopes in the printer lab on every new official firmware release (approximately 1-2x per year for 2 or 3 products), we generally weren't firing the printers up more than once every 4-6 months. It was almost guaranteed that the inkjet printers would have dried out ink tanks or clogged nozzles when we pulled them out of storage, but the dye sub printers worked every single time.
Also, as an aside, you mention PictBridge as a way to hook cameras and printers together - one of my tasks as a developer on said scope line was to implement PictBridge on the scope (we were an embedded Linux platform with barely enough space for the kernel, utilities and scope application, let alone anything resembling a 'proper' Linux printer stack). I essentially had the scope emulate a digital camera with one image (the screen) and you could attach the scope to a PictBridge compatible printer and get your hardcopy that way. Our scope supported both USB host and device mode, which made this trickery possible in the first place.
That entire process is a story of its own - we were one of the few non-Japanese companies creating PictBridge compatible devices at all, and certainly the only test and measurement company creating them. That, combined with the very non-standard hardware (i.e. not an actual digital camera), the very flaky, Windows 2000-only validation software, and the language barrier with the PictBridge standard certification body made validating PictBridge functionality with the hardware quite the ordeal.
My first contact with these kind of printers was the Star SJ-144 from 1993. This was a pretty mainstream full format printer from the well established Star Micronics brand back in the days.
(Retail price was low at about 500 USD and when new on the market, many of the typical consumer stores had it in stock together with the typical run-of-the-mill inkjet printers from Epson, HP or Canon. The SJ-144 was even sometimes advertised as some kind of a "dry inkjet" technology.)
We had DiSub printers at my Amiga shop back in 1992-1995. Primera was one of the units we sold. I was blown away by it. Really felt like “the future.” Another great video! Thank you!
I still remember Ring Video, the last Amiga holdout in the Chicagoland area. I miss geeking out at that place with my late friend Russell.
Back in 1997 I worked for an engineering company. They developed a lot of manuals. They had a graphics department with a fleet of dyesub printers. I don't remember being wowed by them being new, so I'm sure I had seen dyesub printers before that.
I remember dye-sub printers was a thing in the mid to late '90s for when you HAD to have ultra-glossy output or the most punchy print possible.
Color Lasers were getting more common (but monochrome lasers still far outsold color ones) but the output back then was merely OK, the prints have gotten a lot better since (and less matte).
This left a gap for when the Marketing or PR department wanted something better and dye-sub printers was being sold to fill that gap.
The output did look better than contemporary color laser printers, even when using the "basic" CMYK transfer roll, and at least some of the higher-end models could use different "transfer rolls" with additional colors. When somone tried to get I company I worked for to to lease one back then they showed several absolutely GLORIOUS prints done on one, one of which they said had used an CMYK+gold+silver transfer roll (because everyone knows perfect "metal foil" fields are important, right? right?) and I do remember them mentioning other specialty transfer rolls being available too (perhaps flourescent colors added? or wider-gamut?). Obviously printing got slower and more expensive the more colors it had to lay down.
I expect very few of these have survived, my impression was that they were expensive and unreliable even when new and mostly leased (including service and consumables) so most went back to the leasing vendor after a few years which probably swapped in a new and now much better color laser, I do remember several early to mid 2000's color laser printers advertising with "now with more glossy print" which I presume was to try to better position them as replacements.
Searching for information on these today is hard because most of the hits are for the modern "dye sublimation heat transfer imprinting" printers which are often used to print on things like T-Shirts, ceramic, metal and mugs - as I understand it these print using liquid ink on a transfer paper (IE inkjet!), and then using heat to sublimate (they claim) the now solid ink onto the object from the transfer paper - these may actually use sublimation since they can't rely on an absorbing surface. Many just call these dye sublimation which completely mess up searches for the other kind.
FWIW, dye sublimation may be a misnomer insofar as the dye does actually pass through a liquid phase, but it's NOT liquid transferring to the paper. It's still dye in the gaseous phase.
But yeah, it's super annoying how the low-end t-shirt printing market has co-opted the term "sublimation printer" for inkjets with special ink.
You are an awesome presentator:
Informative, enjoyable presented, and a great person!
Great vid as always! Panasonic actually made fax machine/printers that used 'film' as they called it. It worked very similar just in black and white. You bought a roll of 'film' and the film moved WITH the paper as it was fed through. So if you printed a blank page...welp you lost a page worth of 'film' . I worked at a Panasonic repair center/call center in the early 2k's . Some techs had these printers or fax machines on their desks and even they rewound the film roll when it ran out. For anyone interested some model numbers were kx-fpc95 kx-fp155, kx-fp151, kx-fp101 and hundreds more.
Love seeing the Creative Commons tag at the end! Free knowledge from cool people! :D
I love how you can see it drawing the hughlight rectangle. Even that is a struggle. I love it.
The first dye sublimation printer I ever saw was around 1992 (plus or minus a year, I need to look it up). It was at a supercomputing symposium.
I think it was made by Tektronix (I still have sales brochures, so I can look this up.) It printed on a 8.5x11" (maybe 8x10"?) sheet of polyester. (That's the metallic sheen of the "paper".)
The sample prints were the most amazing things I had ever seen printed. They looked just like glossy photographs. In 1992 this was absolutely stunning. (And the printer was stunningly expensive too.)
Yep, Tektronix was huge in that market at the time. They eventually sold off their printer division to Xerox. Fargo was another.
The other high-quality, eye-wateringly expensive color printer technology back then (which had actually been around since the late 70s!) was inkjet. But not the dinky desktop inkjet, but continuous inkjet (mostly the Iris brand) which did 1800dpi fine art prints back when an office printer was lucky to do 360dpi in black and white. (And they did, in fact, work exactly like the hypothetical wasteful inkjet he talked about in the video: they ejected droplets across the entire page width, but used electrostatic deflection to steer unwanted droplets into a waste receptacle. This allowed the droplet generation to be far finer and consistent than on-demand inkjet was capable of at the time.)
In 1993 I was making printer drivers for large format 11” x 17” dye sublimation printers. They were cutting edge at the time and very expensive. We also had a Fuji Pictography that used lasers to expose photographic paper and actually developed the prints like a mini photo lab. Pretty awesome. We also had the very first digital camera that was basically a standard SLR camera with a CCD mounted to the backplate and the power winder section on the bottom was replaced with a hard drive. I think it was 640x480 and cost was $10,000.00. We were a digital imaging company that made postscript controllers for laser printers etc.
One of the advantates of a dyesub printer was the fact that (at the time), the color was very high resolution, and the color "blending" was better and produced essentially photographic quality output - compared to anything at time time. (ink jets, laser, etc all had a pixelation issue that dyesubs didn't have.) - the downside to the dyesubs as you clearly note was the waste in the ink as well as the added cost of the special paper. (I worked for a department at a university that needed high quality color output - and we considered dyesub as a possibility - but we also needed large format printing, so we went with high end inkjet printers instead... (well - we also had a Calcomp E-size pen plotter, but - that's a different era). Always enjoy your videos - they hit on a lot of gadgets I saw and some of which I actually used.
I have an IBM Thinkpad 390e that has 1 USB port. It was made in 1999. I was quite surprised when I plugged in a modern optical mouse and it actually worked! I love dumb old tech 👍🏼 keep up the great videos!
We had the Alps MD-5000 and I can confirm the banding. Dad bought the printer because the prints WERE better than inkjet at the time. Thanks for the video CRD. Brought back a lot of nostalgia and good feels.
Another great video!
It took me back to 1999 when my mom and grandma came to visit me in Hawaii. As the trip was over they had the pictures developed and mailed me the CDs with the pictures on them because it was cheaper than mailing real photos.
This reminds me of the first color printer I ever had, way back in 1984 (I think) with my Commodore 64. It wasn't dye sub, but rather thermal wax transfer. It used two types of cartridge; black and CMY, and you had to switch them depending on whether you wanted to do a mono or color print. You also needed claycoat paper in order to get a smooth print. With a color print, there were three passes, as it printed Yellow, then Magenta, then Cyan (IIRC; can't verify which order it was anymore) and was hella wasteful just like a dye-sub. You couldn't reuse the ribbon; once it passed the printhead it was effectively spent. I don't recall how expensive the cartridges were, but they weren't particularly cheap. Also, this multipass process was very slow (and a little noisy) because it was done on a line by line basis.
It was made by Okidata and was quite possibly the first affordable consumer-targeted color printer - the OkiMate 10. It was horribly slow, not very high DPI, but boy was it novel! Predated inkjet printers on the market by several years. I believe there was a follow-up model; the 20, but I never went for that one. After a year or two, I "grew up" and got an Epson MX-80 or whatever it was, a mono 9-pin impact printer that was much more practical for printing documents. It even had an NLQ mode so yeah, much better text printing. Kept that until I upgraded to an HP Deskjet 660.
Cool video, as always! Nice work!
I actually had the early Fargo full page dye-sub printer in 94 or 95. The prints were great but the cost of the printer was I think around $2000 if I remember right and per page was quite expensive. I got HP Laserjet 4 around same time and I think that was around $1200.
My parents had one of these from canon, if I remember correctly, that actually had a *docking station* for a specific camera on the top of the printer. I didn’t know it was dye-sub at the time, I didn’t even know what that was, but I did remember it printing the entire page at once in one color, retracting it, and doing two more passes, again, an entire page at a time.
This is actually almost exactly how Walgreens photo printers' work. the only difference that jumps out to me is that the reels Walgreens uses are only one color so it's probably some other technology at play for color, but the thing that really made me realize this was when you noted that the paper and reel come in the same box, it's also our standard practice to replace them both at the same time, although sometimes the roll of paper slightly outlives the ribbon.
I can think of two uses for a kid in the late 90s that would've been epic:
* Making your own magazines (either small format or just patching them together)
* Video game and tv show t-shirts
i always get told "you are too young to remember cassetes or walkmans" and then i take out the walkman my grandma gave me for my first birthday and had been using for 21 years
I had that Alps printer. It’s true that it was slow and had banding. Think I bought it in ‘99. Photos looked really great for the time.
I worked for a silicon shop in the 90's which utilized a Mitsubishi, it was very very pricey to use and we used it for packaging demonstrations before we went it off to the commercial printer. I seem to recall we figured out that a single page was something like $140 a sheet. It wasn't cheap but it did accurately represent what the commercial printer would be delivering.
Being able to take a screenshot of a video game or tv show is really awesome.
My family's business started doing Photobooths for weddings around 2009 peak recession, so I'd grab the cheapest Dye Sub printers I could and quickly found out the reason they were so cheap was because they were about to be discontinued and the the ink and paper rolls for them would be unavailable soon. A couple years later we got the heavy duty ones they have inside the kiosks at CVS/Walmart to print your own digital photos and those were not "road worthy" at all so I've spent more time than I care to admit fixing these damn printers and I have to say, the moving parts inside are unbelievably simple. Your explanation of how it actually works cleared up alot for me, albeit; a few years too late, but really cool to finally understand exactly what was going on inside.
Speaking of weddings/event/photobooths. I feel like this printer added in those video capture and live feed features so you could use some kind of compositing equipment to put watermarks/borders/logos on the images and print them. Would be super useful at an event back in the late 90s when taking group photos and need them printed out right then and there or theme parks when they try to sell you a picture of you on a ride.
you derserve 1,000,000 at least. Keep it up! been here since 2019
My very first digital camera was a Casio QV-3000SX bundled with a Casio dye sub printer. Transfer to printer and the PC was RS232 over MiniJack :D To this day i'm sad i sold it, it would have been awesome to have it to this day. Good fun!
Ok, in the 80's, we had a commodore 64, like so many. And out of the multitudes of printer options, we had an Okimate 10, which was a thermal color printer. It printed full sized sheets of paper. Instead of having a full sheet of the thermal ink, it had a ribbon that it laid across the page as the print head passed. And yes, as you mentioned, there was often banding. And yes, you couldn't really reuse the ribbon because of the blank spots left, even though we did with the black ribbons for draft prints of documents. We'd keep a couple of old ribbons around for that purpose, where a a few gaps in letters wouldn't matter. And then use a fresh ribbon for a final print. And as you figured, being that there weren't really any digital pictures to print, you mostly printed documents, with the occasional paint program art piece in color. And speaking of color, yes, it had to make 3 passes, each line, to print a line of color. Took ages to print, but at least the ink came in convenient cassettes. Actually, I still have my full commodore setup, with 1541 disk drive, and okimate 10, and some ribbons. But it was a consumer model thermal ink color printer in the 80s, that got used for documents, and crappy paint program documents. Had all of the pitfalls you mentioned too. Minus the page sized ink ribbon. In the 80's
I sold those alps printers in 1999 at Staples.. I tried to sell it to everyone I could because the print quality was so much better. The alps printers actually used 5 continuous ribbons (CMYK and clear), it pushed the paper out in yellow, sucked the paper back in, printed in cyan, sucked paper back in etc etc.. I loved those things, you got so close to photo quality on standard printer paper.. one of the ribbons was indeed clear "Gloss".. The printer allowed for 8.5 x 11". Also the ribbons were super cheap, i think i remember them being $10 a pop? The printer was about the same price as your generic hp inkjet.. Many people went with brother thermal fax machine / printer combos because they were cheaper than the ink jets and the alps, with more functionality..
In the latter 1990s, I worked for a company that did TV ad insertion. They also had a tv channel that just ran slide shows of stuff like real estate listings. It could queue up attached SVHS decks and play videos too. We used a printer like this attached to the 486 computer that created the slideshows. The slideshow computer sytem was called Multi-Image (I think) from a company based in Chico, CA. For the few clients that wanted a proof of their new ad, we could print off 4x6s with a printer like the one you feature. I think the 486 used a targa graphics card with a resolution of something like 512x400 maybe, it wasn't 640x480. Our printer used the video input feature you demonstrated. I don't remember the make/model of the printer.
I'm convinced that modern ink jet printers are approaching the wastefulness of dye-sub printers. The manufacturers make all their money on selling refills, so they use all the colors when printing black (to make "blacker blacks"), don't fill the cartridges all the way, don't use all the ink in the cartriges, use proprietary software to prohibit refills, and charge an arm and a leg to buy official cartridges.
Dye Sub tech is described in detail in the book "How Computers Work" circa 1993.
The Alps MD-5000 used mini cassette ribbons like a thermal word processor from the 90s used. It printed the image in strips. I've used one before and the quality was fantastic and it printed FAST compared to period photo inkjets. The problem is they don't make the ribbons anymore. Also, bonus feature, it had METALLIC ribbons available.
As for early devices, Sony did make that full line of dye sub printers to do exactly what you wanted to do, printing video stills. They were likely sold in combination with their early Mavica Video Floppy cameras. As for dedicated printers, I think the Apple Scribe released in 1984 was a dye sub printer. It was advertised to use standard paper, but the quality suffered, so you needed the special paper.
At my old workplace we had a little photo printer that also applied one color after the other, but the cool thing is that the printer was so small, after each pass it spit out the photo almost completely and then sucked it back in to apply the next color. Which was pretty cool because you could essetially watch the whole process.
I would have guessed the embossing effect was due to about the exact opposite -- that the paper is expanding when and where it absorbs the ink.
Fun video.