On 7/26/06, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote:
Nah, my favorite "cheezy" printing
technology has always been thermal
transfer. Nothing beats waiting from 12 to 35 minutes for a C64 to
print out a full page in color, on curled paper, smelling very much like
hot wax. You can smell the quality!
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.
-ethan