(This review is still being revised pictures are forthcoming)
Summary
Pros & Cons
In Depth Review
References
Summary: (top)
Kodak's 8600 and
8650 printers are CMY printers which produce excellect quality dye-sublimation
output at an high speed with a relatively high cost per page. The
printers use rolls of donor ribbon with rectangles of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow
and Overcoat in succession. The overcoat provides excellent fade resistance
as well as environmental protection, ie - fingerprints, smudging, coffee,
etc. The 8650 printers are also capable of taking donor ribbon rolls with
a rectangle of Black in place of the overcoat layer (not reviewed). When
these CMYK ribbons are used there is obviously is no overcoat and thus
the output is relatively more fragile.
Both the 8600 and 8650 printers can also take Black
and Overcoat ribbons with which to produce rapid high quality monochrome
images at a slightly lower cost per page and with the protective layer.
Both the 8600 and 8650 have non PostScript as well as PostScript versions.
The PostScript capable printers have both a standard printer driver from
which any application can print and an export plugin for PhotoShop which
is significantly faster and more tuneable than the PostScript printer driver.
The non PostScript version of the printer can only use the export plugin
for PhotoShop. For most applications (photos) the export plugin will be
all that is necessary.
The 8600 printers are discontinued but are often
available used. The 8650 printers are current and can be purchased new
from Kodak dealers. The hardware differences between the printers are relatively
minor in that the 8650 can print CMYK, and has somewhat faster processing
hardware. CMY output should not differ between them, and the actual speed
difference is fairly small. 8600's may be upgraded to 8650's by contacting
Kodak (unknown price). The 8650's include Kodak CMS software.
New 8650 printers tend to run around $7000.00 and used prices are of
course much lower. Read on for the bulk of the review.
Pros: (top)
True photo quality output,
Long lasting resist-everything
output,
High speed SCSI interface
built in,
Slightly slower parallel
port built in,
High capacity paper feeder
(like a laser),
Glossy output,
Built like a tank,
Fast after image processing
(70sec/page)
Most colors are quite accurate
with little tweaking,
Does not band like inkjet
and inexpensive dye-sub
Cons: (top)
Must keep it VERY dust free
(more advice on this later),
No non-PostScript printer
driver for SCSI port or Parallel port,
Relatively expensive media,
($2.30 /page)
MUST use special paper,
No matte or satin media
available,
Image processing and transfer
can be slow,
heavy,
Very expensive,
Truest yellow is more golden
than yellow,
Bands slightly in an extremely
subtle way
In Depth Review: (top)
I found an absurdly great deal on a used mint condition
8600 PS and was pretty much forced to buy it. (You can sell me almost anything
if I have a vague use for it and the deal is good enough.) I checked carefully
on all statistics and costs associated with the printer before I bought
it and finally decided to go for it.
Getting the printer from my car to my computer was an interesting operation
given the inaccessibility and rickety stairs of my house, but I eventually
managed by giving up on the box and just carrying the printer itself up.
Taking it out of the box I was struck by an overall impression of solidity
and build quality. I had ordered the necessary paper and donor ribbon from
B&H Photo of NYC for $230.00 for
100 including shipping. The paper required no particular special intervention,
just stick a bunch in the paper tray glossy side down and insert it into
the printer pretty much just like my Lexmark Laser printer.
The ribbon however is a bit different than the consumables for most printers. Never mind having a thin little ribbon on a moving head which scans across the page. With a dye-sub printer this expensive let's just have a ribbon the width of the page! AND a printer head the width of the page! So the printer head doesn't have to move at all as the paper goes by dramatically reducing most possible banding causes. It also makes the print head rather expensive if you think about it a bit. The printer can print eight inches wide. Thus the head has elements across it for eight inches. It's a 300dpi printer (true) so 300 * 8 = 2400. There are 2400 'elements' in the printer head. Wait, it gets better. Dye-sublimation printers work by heating each element of their head to a variable temperature which affects the color of the dye deposited on the page. The 8600 prints with 24 bit accuracy, so each color is 8 bits or 256 levels. Thus EACH element can heat itself to at least 256 exact temperatures with pinpoint accuracy, without affecting it's neighbors and with astonishing transient speed as the paper flows by. In actuality each element can probably heat to more than 256 distinct temperature levels as in the real world 256 linear levels of temperature probably don't produce 256 'linear' color levels.
If you missed the point of my technical discussion above then imagine this.. A typical Epson ink jet head has 48 nozzles. They either fire a dot or they don't. That's that. The Kodak 8600 print head has the equivalent of 2400 nozzles each of which can fire 256 different sizes of dots. That's a lot harder. This also contributes to the cost per page as each rectangle of color on the ribbon is the size of a page, so quite a bit is unused and unusable after a print since anywhere you haven't got any cyan doesn't use the cyan from the ribbon.
The ribbon comes with an alcohol swab and a water swab packet which you should use to clean the appropriate parts of the printer. Do NOT clean the head with anything not reccommended. As I have just mentioned it is probably quite expensive both for parts and labor to replace.
After cleaning the printer and installing the ribbon on it's holders I turned it on and watched it initialize. It whirs the ribbon back and forth a bit to look at it then proudly tells you what ribbon you have in it as well as what mode you are in (raster or PostScript). Fairly easy to use menus reminiscent of pager menus control the hardware settings. They are relatively hard to set wrong. The one exception being that you MUST print in raster mode when the printer is in raster mode and in PostScript mode when the printer is in PostScript mode. If you don't you'll have the same experience that you'd have with other printers. The printer will spit out a blank sheet or two, and feed the ribbon. Not too bad with a 2cent/page laser printer, but a horror when pages cost you $2.30 each..
I received it with no instructions or software (I
knew it was that way). Software was no problem as I simply grabbed the
latest drivers off of Kodak's site. While on the Kodak site I also signed
up for their developers group and obtained access to the documents which
would allow me to write my own drivers if I so desired. A quick glance
through them confirmed my suspicion that there were few differences between
the 8600 and 8650. I also noted that the technical documentation was quite
complete. Perhaps in the future I'll get around to writing a standard (non-PostScript)
printer driver for the SCSI/parallel port.
I happen to have a relatively recently acquired
Adara PhotoStar Slide/Negative scanner
which I got a great deal on (although not nearly the deal the printer was).
The PhotoStar is a 30bit depth 1850 optical dpi scanner which provides
me with high quality digital source material.
I generally store the images I like at 3000x2000 or so in Adobe's PSD lossless format after cropping, and color balancing. I may then resize the 30MB image down to 1024 by something, retouch (dust removal, sharpening, color enhancement), and save it out as JPEG for web use. So I had plenty of good source material to try out on the printer. I started up a print of some yellow and red tulips via the PhotoShop export module with default settings and prepared to wait. A very welcome progress bar showed the image being transferred to the printer and the printer immediately fed a sheet of paper. About a half of the way through the transfer the printer extruded the paper from the front with the yellow layer done. It sucked it back in and 3/4 of the way through the transfer it extruded it again with magenta added. A few seconds after the transfer completed it then extruded it with cyan, sucked it back in and extruded it again immediately with the overcoat layer. One thing of interest here is that the actual process of printing (extruding the page) takes very little time. Most of the time is in the transfer and processing. I suspect if I hooked it up to my SCSI card it would be even faster. Even so the printer is no slouch at speed, easily outdistancing every other color printer I've ever had.
My first reaction to the image was delight as the colors were pure and continuous. My second reaction was annoyance as the paper had somehow picked up some dust mostly in a line across the sheet. The dust had apparently accepted some of the dye layers before coming loose with the result that the area beneath each dust particle was missing one or two layers of dye. This particular problem is one which people often complain about and I have found with quite a bit of experimentation that it isn't too hard in a normal household environment to minimize this problem. (the solution)
In any case after I'd cleaned the printer more carefully I made a few more printouts and was amazed by the quality of the images. Deep saturated colors, and (to my eye) infinite tonality of color ranges. Eventually I printed out a test page with color ramps (here) and I can't distinguish between single levels of any of the particular colors. One thing I really noticed about the printer is that the 'yellows' are more of a golden-yellow than a true 'yellow' And they are certainly different than the yellow on my screen. The other colors are close enough from screen to printer that they warrant no mention. What I really wish someone would make in color management software is a kind of slimmed down version of what is currently available.
Most color management software is intended for graphic artists and magazine people. They want to make their desktop proofer ie - the XLS 8600 look just like or close to the final magazine output. Most normal people and photographers really only care that the monitor shows them what is going to come out of the printer if I printed. As I understand it the monitor has a wider gamut than the printer does, being able to come close to any color that comes out of the printer. Thus it should be possible to make a small color management package where you print a test image out to the printer then hold the test image close to the screen and adjust some controls to cause the screen image to be fairly close to what's on the paper. Unfortunately I don't think there's any color management package that just does this. They all seem to be large complex systems which really need those annoying color densitometers that none of us have. Oh well, I should receive PhotoShop 5 soon (another great deal) and I'll be able to try out it's new color management stuff.
All in all, after printing quite a few images of different types I would have to say that generally the 8600 outperforms most 'C' color enlarging work I've had done for me in the past, as I have a greater degree of control over the color, contrast and sharpness of the output. Not to mention the special effects one can use. One major annoyance for me is the lack of truly well thought out reasonably priced color management software for photographers and artists. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future as I've been told that color management software on the PC is in it's infancy and there is much better stuff available for Macintoshes which hasn't yet been ported.
Incidentally, if anyone REALLY wants to see the output from this type of printer feel free to contact me and I'll send you a picture for the price of postage, paper and ribbon. Otherwise go to any local digital color lab and they likely have one or two of them inside of those Kodak digital photo stations. Some supermarkets and one hour places have them too.