A few classic computer photos

Zane H. Healy wrote: He works for a third party. From what I've been told, most of the Fuji machines that are "out there" are out on some form of lease agreement. That is, you pay ?x per year for the machinery, $y for all the consumables, and $THIRD_PARTY sends out an engineer to fix it when something goes wrong. AIUI, there aren't many Fuji Frontiers (or minilabs in general) that were bought outright. From what I've heard, the cost of a brand-new Fuji Frontier is somewhere between ?75k and ?300k depending on the options you want. Most of the minilab machines I've worked on were base-model or slightly above. If you can live with something that's a little behind the tech curve and has been refurbished at least once, think around ?15k-?20k as a starting price. If properly maintained, Frontiers are near bulletproof aside from some really silly design faults. Specifically, on the 570 the cables connectors. These should have had clips, or better connectors. On the 350, the distribution unit tends to get a little unreliable -- meaning you get paper jams every few minutes. You can disable the distribution, but it slows the printing down from ~1 print per 5 seconds to around 1 print per 15 seconds. Not really a good thing in a busy photo lab. The one thing that does annoy me is that the printing fault was declared a "software issue" in July, and none of the three servoids thought to check the cable that goes from the CTL23 to the backprinter module. It took this cable slipping out far enough to disconnect half the pins and trip the "loose cable detect" circuitry before it got plugged back in, which fixed three faults in one shot (power-on error, not heating up, backprint). I mean, seriously, aren't "loose cables" second on the list of things to check, right after "is the power on?" Well, we've got what amounts to a new backprinter in the Frontier. It's not a major bit of kit, but it's nice to be able to read the filenames on the back of the prints again. It's funny, if the centre row of a 9-pin DM printer is missing, 8s look a lot like 0s. Makes for good fun when sorting and packing orders after they've been printed. The full list of repaired bits -- from memory: - Printer assembly (head and driver board) - Backing pad (think "platen") - Two print ribbons ("hmm, it's missing dots, must be the ribbon... oh, they sent us a duff ribbon, better try another one... hmm, still no? oh, I give up") - Printer to driver-PCB cable On the bright side, I doubt the backprinter will develop any serious faults for quite some time.. :) -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/