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To make ZINK photo paper, which Herchen says feels exactly like regular photo paper, the researchers start with a white plastic sheet as a base material, then add very thin layers of dye crystals. The dye molecules that make up these crystals are structured in such a way that the crystal is transparent. When heat is applied, the molecules change their physical orientation from a crystal to an amorphous glass, a process that releases color.
The configuration of the crystal layers--yellow on top, magenta in the middle, and cyan on the bottom--is a crucial element in the printing process. When these layers pass through the thermal printhead, says Herchen, they are heated by 300 tiny heaters per square inch. And in order to bring out the appropriate color at each pixel, the temperature and amount of time each heater is on is precisely controlled. The crystals in the yellow top layer require the highest temperature to show their color but the shortest amount of time. To turn on the cyan bottom layer, the heaters operate at their lowest temperature for the longest amount of time. Bringing color out of the magenta middle layer requires heating times and temperatures somewhere in between.
"[The printer] is doing combinations of these pulses for every single pixel," says Herchen. To produce a green pixel, for instance, the heating element would turn on some yellow layers with a quick, high-temperature pulse, cool back down, and then turn on cyan with a longer, low-temperature pulse. It takes only tens of microseconds to deliver these pulses. In a typical two-by-three-inch picture, which takes less than a minute to print, there are approximately two hundred million heat pulses.
A technology based on thermal heating begs the question: how easy is it to ruin the paper before and after one has printed a picture? Herchen says that laboratory tests have shown that the paper--both before and after printing--doesn't change colors at temperatures as high as 70 °C (158 °F). And if placed in sunlight, the picture will fade at a rate similar to that of other thermal printings and many inkjet printings: about 5 to 15 years.Some analysts think that ZINK's technology has the capability to change the way people think about photos. "Right now, we're still relatively formal about photos," says Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO and cofounder of Guidewire Group, a technology research firm. People take pictures, collect them, and put them in books, but if they're taken with a cell phone, often they stay there, she says. "The idea that a photo can be a note, a moment captured and shared quickly, is something that ZINK enables," Shipley says. In the short run, she says, the technology could make photo sharing more casual.
Herchen says ZINK has plans for two products by the end of the year: a stand-alone portable printer and a printer integrated into a digital camera, both producing two-by-three-inch pictures. While the printer can be designed into tiny gadgets, it can also be integrated into larger electronics, and Herchen expects that within the next few years the printing technology could also show up in computer towers, laptop computers, and even home television sets.
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What about Dye Sublimation?
The Samsung SPP-2040, or Canon's line of CP- printers do amazing jobs of printing high-quality photos.
Yes, but how long will the picture last?
If all of the "ink" is embedded in the paper, then what happens if you leave your paper in a hot car for a few days?
Re: Yes, but how long will the picture last?
If you read the package for any film/electronics product it tells you never to store it in an overheated environment. Of course it will fall apart. Would you leave rolls of film in a hot car for a week? Your digital camera? CD-Rs aren't even supposed to be stored in hot cars, but we do it any way. Just think.
still begging the wrong question
that's two tech review articles i've read in one day that mis-use "beg the question". tsk.
I would be happy to have a printer for text and black and white images that used regular copy paper or notebook paper. Most of my printing does not require color.
Couldn't an image be lightly burned onto normal paper, not enough to make a hole, just to char the surface and turn it black? If not burning, then some other method of changing the color of normal paper molecules without using inks?
Charring would not really be an option, because reaching levels that can actually burn paper would probably not be a good idea. However, I'm not printer expert. But, I do agree that a B&W only option would be excellent for creating drafts that need to be developed on the spot, but then again, that is what thermal printers do for things like electronic parking ticket machines.
First, Polaroid tried something like this (quick photos) and developed a printer that utilized their standard polaroid film stock. It would flash the digital image directly onto the stock and then pop out the image. This never caught on, but I still think it's cool.
Second, regardless of how long these things last, I think that this will be a great invovation for social art. Andy Warhol used Polaroids. What will a new artist do with Zink? (I must mention that the Warhol Polaroids are still able to be viewed. Who knows how long Zink will last.) Perhaps our belief that art should last forever is too contemporary. The Japanese used to create art on materials that would degrade over time as the image was meant to be natural and eventually return from whence it came. Perhaps this is a belief of a by-gone era.
Why does $.02 cents of ink cost $30.00? The whole industry is crooked. My old ribbon based printer could print thousands of pages before it needed a new ribbon. Now some $30.oo black ink cartage is lucky to print a hundred pages before running out. This is Moores Law in reverse.
The printing industry is optimizing their profits per page. This does have the greening effect of keeping us from printing too much.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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oconnmic
21 Comments
WOW!!!! Wait...a thermal printer?
Gee, who would have thunk it, they reinvented thermal paper. Remember that technology?
The printer was small and light weight but the paper was outrageously expensive and had a shelf life of a couple of years if you used it or not. Open a box of old paper and it was all brown.
No one would use it for anything permanent like files or legal records. You couldn't leave it on your desk or it would fade away from the flourscent lights (forget sunlight or putting it on the wall in a frame). Even if you put it in a file at normal room temperature it became unreadable in a few years or disappeared completely.
Maybe they fixed all that.
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betterdeal
2 Comments
Re: WOW!!!! Wait...a thermal printer?
It brings back memories, I sold Thermo Fax (3M)copying machines in 1960 and yes it was brown paper that didn't last but a few years. The cost in 1960 was $359.00 and 3M would not cut the price a penny even when I sold IBM a large order!
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betterdeal
2 Comments
Re: WOW!!!! Wait...a thermal printer?
It was $359.95 yes I sold Thermo Fax in 1961 and made Eager Beaver for top sales. The old brown paper brings back memories and I can't believe it will be accepted today.
Betterdeal
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