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.

Finally found something! from: https://www.techgearlab.com/topics/small-and-home-office/best-photo-printer
Kodak Step Instant Mobile:
Epson Expression Photo HD XP-15000:
PIXMA G620:

It's important to note that the limitations shown above for the thermal paper are at least in part (and probably a large part) limitations of the printer, not so much the medium. There is very distinct banding going on, but the way the bands are sharply defined, suggests the paper would be capable of much higher resolution. Gamut/color space of course is another matter; these examples don't give much insight into that angle. I do have some doubts about crosstalk behavior as I expect that the thermal energy 'bleeds' quite readily into the adjacent layer(s) despite the 'filter'/isolation layers in-between. This would reduce the practically achievable gamut considerably. It's similar to the shoot-through phenomenon you get with optical RA4 papers. Inkjet is of course immune to this, which is one of the several reasons it has a higher potential than an optical medium in this regard.

This is showing "Kodak step". Kodak 4 pass using the same paper seems to have a lot of detail enough that others put it just slightly less than instax in details. I've seen instax, it can do better than my printer. So I'm still hoping Kodak 4 pass looks goodish. At least for what it is. Its trying to appeal to a casual audience or to a fan base around the mini sized format. Thr initial goal has already been surpassed, I think. Color thermal paper, can it do better than a Walmart receipt? Yup, it can. I was initially going to buy a B&W thermal paper printer because the paper is so cheap.

Okay, I got the kodak 4 pass printer. Not sure if this is Zink or some sort of hybrid. They appear to have a selophane roll of different colors, the film is heat laminated on to the paper, yellow, magenta, cyan, clear. The plastic has black sections to control the position of the roll.

The images are 300dpi and look like a print from an old inkjet printer. Its borderline disapointingly good enough.

I printed to the camera/printer from my phone from my dslr in that order, and that was sligtly better. The flash washes out the image, but you need it for a dimly lit room.

Anyway this bear photo was taken on the kodak by my little girl and as I said it looks acceptable just don't look up close if you got myopia or use a lupe because thats disappointingly bad. Here's the photo and a look using a 10x with 20x eye pieces so 30x.

Here's a very comparable news paper print of a delicious burger and a 30x zoom into the lettuce where you can see the individual ink dots. I imagined most of us have news paper ads to take a look and compare. Sorry kodak but someone had to.