Photo printer developments
Today, I picked up a 20 kilogram package from FedEx. Upon opening the more-than-a-litte-abused box, buried in the sea of foam peanuts was a tightly-bubble-wrapped bundle of high-end kiosk-scale photo printer -- A Sinfonia (nee Shinko) CHC-S2145.
It was express-shipped to me by LiveLink Technology, a photo kiosk solution provider based out of Merry Old England, for the express purpose of getting it to work with Linux (by means of Gutenprint). LiveLink bucks the industry trend by using Linux under the hood wherever possible, so by sponsoring this work they benefit through lower costs and greatly improved flexibility, and the community benefits from the native support of a truly professional printer.
The Sinfonia CHC-S2145 carries enough media to handle seven hundred prints at a time, spits out a 4x6" print in seven seconds, and will do so day in and day out. As a testament to their robustness, this one came heavily broken in to the tune of nearly 78,000 prints.
Anyway. I've already committed the initial support to Gutenprint, which now generates proper raw spool files that match the output of the Windows drivers. Unfortunately (as I've come to expect) this printer requires an intelligent, two-way backend, which will take a bit more time to put together. Fortunately I'll able to reuse large chunks of the backend code I've written for other dye-sublimation printers.
In other news, earlier this holiday weekend I polished most of the rough edges off of the Kodak 1400/805 Gutenprint code, and should have another '805 in a few days -- the seller agreed to send a replacement after the first one aggressively blew the magic smoke out of its power supply.
It's been a productive few days. But now it's time to produce some sleep.