Printomatic paper

Could someone who has dropped their printomatic camera explain what it is? Is it photosensitive paper that one could expose on a diy camera for example? Is it thermal? I find it weird that nobody is experimenting with that paper. No YouTube videos on how it works or anything. Weird!

imgprojts said:

printomatic camera

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Seems to be a ZINK printer. That paper is not photosensitive but is printed thermally to create colour images. Such a camera would take a digital image then print it onto the paper.

So the paper has no magic, then there's a high resolution print head in there? Or do the prints look like normal printer prints?

I see. It's Zink TM not zinc. The resolutions I'm reading about are like 300tpi. But the websites say things like "billions" of color christals that change color. I'm surprised nobody has thought to print instax/Polaroid and compare that microscopically to a Zink print. If anyone has, Google is getting paid good money to suppress that information. These days they are probably part of that.

There's a concise writeup of the technology here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zink_(printing)
Basically, they're heat-sensitive dyes that are colorless in the unprocessed material, but can be heat-activated and will then retain their color as colorful dyes afterwards. Much like in a color negative film, there's a yellow top layer, then magenta in-between and cyan at the bottom. The top layer responds to fast & intense heat pulses where as the cyan bottom layer responds to slow/long lower-heat pulses. Magenta is the middle ground.

I expect real-world resolution will be a little less than for an optically activated material (unless it relies heavily on chemical diffusion, as in the case of Polaroid & Instax). That's just a hypothetical guess though. I've never worked with this material.

And yes, the camera is really just a small digital camera (much like in a smartphone) packaged together with a small thermal printer. I guess (wild guess) that the printer uses piezoelectric technology to heat the pixel sites.

Pretty neat technology.

I got one for my daughter for Christmas. So come January I'll be comparing the resolution at 10x to see what's up. I saw some videos comparing to Polaroid and you can't tell the difference on just a blogging resolution video. So it must be goodish to barely acceptable maybe?

I expect it's at least on par with Polaroid and Instax, possibly somewhat better.

it sounds like something from a Wallace and Gromit film.

imgprojts said:

So come January I'll be comparing the resolution at 10x to see what's up.

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Update this thread with some results. I'd like to know how it looks, actually.