25 Jul
2006
25 Jul
'06
11:13 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
Sure... cheap thermal transfer is kinda nasty, but I
worked with a
thermal transfer printer in the mid-1990s that was _nice_. We
used it for crisp color images of ice floes near McMurdo station
(the ice, clouds and water were in shades of grey, the annotations
and hazards were in color).
It was an expensive printer (I was told it used about $2 in consumables
per printed page) - it had three rolls of dye that spooled by no matter
what was being printed. Each spool did exactly so many pages then
ran out, even if you printed one pixel on a page. The advantage, I
guess, is a simplified mechanism and consistent printing.
You can't really "conserve" film based on the image
*content*. Usually, the film rides atop the paper
as it passes through the marking engine. It's not
like you can STOP the film's progress while the paper
continues along.