Kodak Press Release 29/10/04

Kodak Monthly Tech Brief Explores How Digital Photo Printers Go Back to the Future

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Oct. 29—It’s a digital photographer’s brain-teaser: If you have a high-megapixel digital camera and need to print pro-quality photos and proofs, do you spend time calibrating and re-adjusting your printer to get consistent photos?  Or just buy a gift basket for your photo lab manager?

This month’s Kodak Tech Brief focuses on the growing use of dye-sublimation printers in home- and small-office photo applications. Pro photographers and advanced amateurs love producing their own high-quality prints, but such high-end printers - which use a continuous-tone ribbon and thermal print head instead of multiple inkjet tanks - were priced above $1,000. 

Kodak designers, who pioneered thermal dye-sub printers for commercial uses a decade ago, stepped back to the future. They revisited how thermal printers handled different paper coatings, starting with the breakthrough thermal printers Kodak launched in the early 1990s.  They developed firmware and hardware improvements that increased print quality and printing speed. The resulting KODAK PROFESSIONAL 1400 Digital Photo Printer ? introduced at Photokina in October 2004 ? is faster than earlier thermal printers, provides higher-quality prints in a wider variety of sizes and formats, and does so at a list price ($549) less than half that of its commercial predecessor, the KODAK PROFESSIONAL 8500 printer.

To learn more about the technologies that led to affordable dye-sublimation printers, visit http://www.kodak.com/go/research.

Kodak Company and infoimaging

Kodak is the leader in helping people take, share, print and view images ? for memories, for information, for entertainment.  The company is a major participant in infoimaging, a $385 billion industry composed of devices (digital cameras and flat-panel displays), infrastructure (online networks and delivery systems for images) and services & media (software, film and paper enabling people to access, analyze and print images).  With sales of $13.3 billion in 2003, the company comprises several businesses: Health, supplying the healthcare industry with traditional and digital image capture and output products and services; Graphic Communications Group, offering on-demand color printing and networking publishing systems consisting of three wholly owned subsidiaries:  Encad, Inc., NexPress Solutions, and Kodak Versamark; Commercial Imaging, offering image capture, output and storage products and services to businesses and government; Display & Components, which designs and manufactures state-of-the-art organic light-emitting diode displays as well as other specialty materials, and delivers imaging sensors to original equipment manufacturers; and Digital & Film Imaging Systems, providing consumers, professionals and cinematographers with digital and traditional products and services.