Archival Printing (was: zip

[Roger Merchberger]

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          |