25 May
2005
25 May
'05
7:18 a.m.
Rumor has it that Vintage Computer Festival may have mentioned these words:
On Tue, 24 May 2005, John Foust wrote:
> Are dye-sublimation printers (see
> http://science.howstuffworks.com/question583.htm ) a good shot for
> printing technologies that might be good for some crazy scheme like
> Paperbytes that'll store digital data on paper?
No, but not due to their media itself; it's due to the fact that the dyes
are designed to spread a bit when they hit the media; and barcodes &
whatnot wouldn't look very crisp. Mine also has a resolution of 314 dpi
(and that's considered quite good), so it's not what you'd call
"hi-rez" by
today's standards... They call it "continuous-tone" printing.
I doubt the concept, but I am curious how dye
sublimation holds out vs.
laser toner, which does outgas and tends to stick adjacent pages together
over time.
It holds out exceptionally well. My printer spits out museum-archival
quality prints; rated for a _minimum_ of 60 years on the wall, cared for
well they could easy hit 100+, and waterproof to boot.
The printer was durned near $1k, and the media & ribbon zings me $2 per
8x10 print.
But it makes nice pictures! ;-)
For medium to low-res barcodes, I'd think it would be better to use an
older 24-pin dot-matrix with good ribbons.... but that's just a guess.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com |