What dye-sub photo printer to buy?
Only dye-sub printer I’ve ever used was an older Tektronix Phaser, and it used sheets of film for the sublimation process (think typewriter ribbon, on a large scale). The hardware was pretty good for its age, Xerox recently bought them out and as far as I know the new Xerox Phasers use the color sticks rather than film. Either way the special paper for the damn thing was costly – like $3-$5 per 8.5″ x 11″ print, and unless Xerox changed this they didn’t use a standard paper size, it was slightly narrower and longer than standard US letter but didn’t seem to be quite long enough to be European sized. We priced them for our lab but couldn’t justify the expense. You can spend several thousand on a good dye sub, but for less than $800 you can pick up a high-res HP inkjet with LCD screen, multiple card readers, and capacity for everything from 3″ x 5″ index card to 11″ x 17″ print sizes. Print speed is slow at high-res though, and not all of the HP with LCD screens actually give you a previ
