New Way to Make Prints #
As our new studio building neared completion, the first new purchase I made for the studio was this tiny Canon Selphy dye-sub printer. Makes 6x4 (actually 149x100mm) postcard prints. The image area is 139x90mm.
I was attracted to this simple printer for a number of reasons:
- cheap to buy and cheap to print
- no fussy inkjet printer woes (dried/blocked nozzles, etc…)
- reasonable quality
- fast and easy to setup and break down. Low resistance to making prints
- small prints that aren’t precious
- no ICC profiles or calibration: what you get is what you get
Made these three prints in a matter of minutes. Tweaking the size and testing the sharpening.
Sublimation? #
If you aren’t familiar with dye-sublimation printing, the printer applies heat to special inks. The heat causes them to sublimate, or convert from a solid to a gas without becoming a liquid. The gaseous ink is then captured on the paper (or other substrate) and bonds with it at the molecular level. Like offset printing, this process is done in passes using cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. In a dye-sub printer, the inks are on a thin ribbon, and the paper is passed along the ribbon one color at a time. If you were to unravel the ribbon you would see rectangles of ink the same size as the paper laid out in order: yellow, magenta, cyan, and a clear layer. Then it would repeat. When you run out of ribbon you load a new one in. Simple.
One advantage is that the paper and ink rolls are usually sold together and are matched 1:1. So you know how many prints you can make, unlike with an ink jet printer, which might run out of one ink and bring everything to a halt.
2026 Plan #
My big plan for 2026 is to regularly make these small prints of recent work and post some of them here. Not the fancy digital capture down-sampled to a JPEG, but a photo of the print like the one at the top of this post. I made that photograph this afternoon while driving back from Moriarty, NM with my Fujifilm X100. Printed it this evening. Photographed the print with my iPhone and sized it for this website.
More to come!