Printers for Digital Images

4/1/96

Fellow microscopists -

A few months ago there was a thread on the server dealing primarily with flatbed scanners and the best technology for acquiring digital images. I may have missed out on the part of the conversation dealing with printing digital images, but perhaps one or some of you might summarize any thoughts on what technologies were considered useful.

I run an EM lab in a Pathology department of a medical school. Most of my EM is diagnostic work on kidney specimens and tumors. We printed out 4,500 images for each of the two past years. I would like to go digital, but finding a printer that will handle this load cheaply and quickly, yet with the required high quality is difficult. We plan to produce the usual 3 1/4" X 4" negatives in our scope as we always have. Then we would scan the negatives into a computer (IBM clone), storing them temporarily on a large hard disk, and ultimately archiving them on a writable CD system. The prints need not be durable as once they are studied and the case closed, they would be trashed. The negatives would be archived as would be the image files on the CD's.

The problem is that people are suggesting dye sub for quality and laser for quick & dirty. I need QUICK & QUALITY......and cheap. Printing on a dye sublimation printer would be too costly. There are some enhancement boards that can be added to laser printers, and I have a friend who has printed some of my scanned negatives on his Photoscan system, Philips's image recording system. They come close to answering the problem, but I am wondering what else there is out there. I believe that Philips's system may be LaserPix or PhotoJet Plus from XLI Corp.

I realize that I may be asking you to repeat a conversation already carried out, but if you could pass on the consensus opinions, I would appreciate it.

Joiner Cartwright, Jr., Ph.D.
joiner@bcm.tmc.edu

We're happy with a Lexmark Optra R for our spm images. it has 1200 dpi. cost $1600 with total of 10 MB ram.

don chernoff
E-Mail: asm@indy.net

Joiner, Check out the printer that Ted Pella Inc is selling. It makes 8.5 X 11 B&W prints for $0.60 and it prints 256dpi with 256 greyscale values. The quality seems quite good, the process uses silver & a polyester paper. You can take scanned-in images from negatives to prints this way. The machine costs about $12K I think. If you call them, please be so kind as to say that someone who saw it at a recent local meeting in AZ recommended it to you (I'm the President of the local MSA affiliate, the Arizona Imaging & Microanalysis Society). Douglas W. Cromey
email: dcromey@ccit.arizona.edu

In response to your recent message posted on the newsgroup concerning digital printers, there are several options. The first going to laser printers, and the second being dye sub printers. The cost of laser is obviously cheap, but not high enough quality perhaps for publication or reports where a photo is required. Dye sub printers ex: sony makes two digital dye sub printers. The first being model UP-D1500CN, it ouputs a picture size of approx. 3 5/8" x 4 3/4" which is near photographic quality. This printer sells for approx. $ 1,850.00 US and the print cost is approx. .86 cents. for color images. The other printer from sony is the UPD-8800 with Interface card is approx. $7,300 US and the print cost for 8.5" x 11" is approx. $ 2.20 These printers will ouput a print in approx. 60 seconds. I do have sample prints if you require to see some.

Sony makes a digital thermal printer that outputs approx. a polaroid size image on thermal paper in about 3.5 seconds, cost per print is approx. 9 cents.

Epson makes some low cost printers, with a decent low cost image, the only problem with laser or ink jet with these images is that it takes quite a while to print.

I don't know if I was helpful or not, but if I can be of any assistance, please feel free to contact me at your convenience.

Philip Slakmon
Scott Scientific
E-Mail: slakmon@scottscientific.com
info@scottscientific.com
sales@scottscientific.com
admin@scottscientific.com

Check out DOUBLE RES IV from Laser Printer Accessories Corp., a board you install into your current laserjet II or III to get 600 dpi quality. We have one and it really does make a BIG difference. 1-800-225-4098.

Walter F. Bobrowski
E-Mail: BOBROWW@AA.WL.COM

Joiner, You might want to consider a printer like the Harris PhotoPro. It is a silver salt laser printer which is capable of 256 gray levels at 256dpi, and I think its newest printer is better than that. The costs per 8by11 page are less than a $1. The initial drawback is the printer's price tag which is >$10k.

The quality is better than a dye-sub as the grays are true even if the black isn't as black as wet chem photo paper.

Call them and ask for a few SEM sample prints ... I think you'll be amazed. Harris can be reached at 800-944-3389. Hope this helps ...

Michael Shaffer
mshaf@oregon.uoregon.edu -or- mshaf@darkwing.uoregon.edu

Dr. Cartwright, We have been using XLI's LaserPix 5.0 high resolution laser printer enhancement for MS Windows 3.1 during the past 2 years. An HP LaserJet (LJ) IV has been printing out our digital SEM images directly from our JEOL 6320F. A unique feature from this hardware configuration is the XLIs ability to use the PCs memory for image enhancement & buffer storage rather than using the often costly, and not used for anything else, printer memory. The cost when compared to other such printer set-ups was much cheaper at the time, sometimes by a factor of 2 or 3. I haven't seen anything handle our 1 MB images faster to print either. Image quality will never reach dye sub standards but they can't print at 3 cents / image. The question you have to ask yourself is "is the information I need on the image I'm printing". I have qualitatively answered with a yes on 95% of my image printouts. The other 5% requires a polaroid.

The one exception to image quality was when our digital image quality started to deteriorate about 6 months ago from over use on the HP LJ IV. Since HP no longer supplies these printers and the repair cost was 3/4 of a new HP LJ V, we had to swap a Human Resources LJ IV Plus printer for our LJ IV. It seems our images are more important than the text HR needs for its documents. The LJ IV provided them with the same quality text anyways. The XLI card needed a new/different crystal to operate with the LJ IV Plus or LJ V printers. Cost was $150 for the x'tal + installation on the board.

I highly recommend contacting Roger Wellborn from W-Technology for any questions regarding XLI. He's a sales rep. for them and he's probably the most knowledgeable person I know regarding printing high quality images on LajerJet systems. He phone # is (916) 971-9071. Two other things I recommend are using 1st Chioce Premium Laser Paper from Weyerhaeuser (2.5 cents / sheet vs .75 cent / sheet does make a difference) and when replacing your toner in your printer new cartridges are expensive but better than rebuilt ones. We've tried several rebuilts and have found a difference in image quality. By the way, I have no vested interest in either XLI or HP, just a satisfied customer. Good luck!

Phil Elizondo
PELIZONDO@svc.com

Joiner

Hi! If you don't look at the Harris PhotoPro 2000 Gray Scale Digital Printer you will be making a mistake. I am currently working as an independent rep for Ted Pella, but I just left clinical EM a year ago. I ran a renal immunopathology lab in Chico California for 12 years and in research for an additional 5 years for the Dept of Nephrology at Rush-Presbyterian St. Lukes Med Center in Chicago.

The last two years in my lab I used the Pella Dry Silver Processor made by 3M for all of our clinical work. If you have seen any of the Dry Silver Printer handouts, the cover picture was one of our renal biopsy pictures from my lab. The Harris Printer uses the same dry silver paper but is a laser printer. It is a digital printer that gives you a digital photographic quality prints on photographic paper. The paper is exposed by laser and developed by heat. It is not the same as a thermal printer of the past and is not a dye sublimation printer. The paper is a silver emulsion photographic paper. In the past year it has also been improved to where I would now use it for "publishing quality" prints as well, especially from the Harris printer. Like a lot of products, this one was developed for the military and is used by military systems at this time. The printer can also receive data from several different computer terminals.

Last year we had this system set up at our Pella booth at MSA. I think it will also be there again this year in Minneapolis. If you have any questions regarding this system you may contact either myself or Bob Evans at Ted Pella, Inc. We can also send you some sample photos. I think this printer will fill your needs.

Lee Dickey, Micro Lines Marketing
LeeDMLM@aol.com

I run a similar facility in the Pathology Department of a Veterinary College, but we also serve the entire College as well as some other parts of the university.

With our SEM, we are entirely digital now...I don't even support film on it. With the TEM, we have a side-mounted digital camera system (JEOL TV-CAM) that is used for image acquisition, but we still use film for ublication purposes. Most of the TEM images are for study purposes only, and for this we dump the image (using the system's software) to a Laserjet 4 printer through a Laserpix board. After a bit of processing, ie BCG adjustment, unsharp mask sharpening, etc., you get a "work print" that is usually acceptable. For higher quality, we also have a Codonics dye sublimation printer, on which you can put 4 images per page. For TEM, its certainly better quality than the Laserjet, but is usually not publication quality unless you do some intensive processing. SEM and light micrographs on it however are certainly publication quality.

Since most images we take will not be published, we get along fine with the Laserjet prints for TEM. We do use a high quality glossy paper in it which drives up the cost of the prints to about .12 each. That still beats the 2.00+ of the Codonics. Since going mostly digital, our TEM film images have dropped from about 2000 per year to about 200 per year. The savings in tech labor, direct costs, and chemical wastes are quite substantial.

W. L. Steffens, Ph.D
STEFFENS.B@CALC.VET.UGA.EDU

Joiner - the Lexmark Optra R+ prints at 1200 dpi and probably will be good enough for your purposes (you'll need to put in about 16MB of SIMM memory to get it to print a full page picture). The printer is quick, the prints are cheap (just use a good bight white paper) and closely match the resolution of TEM negatives. It's also easy to set up - no DMA or IRQ conflicts to resolve!! I've used both the XLI and the LasazPrint as well. Both depend on having a VERY good HP4 printer to begin with. Both have tended to band the image. Of the two the LazarPrint seems to have the potential to give the best images (4800dpi) and although the prints I've gotten from Europe (where the board is made) have been beautiful we've never been able to get comparable results here.

Bill Miller
Microbill@aol.com

I recently posted a query concerning printers suitable for producing high quality monochrome images from micrographs scanned into a computer....a printer that would allow me to "go entirely digital" and get me out of the darkroom, at least for all imaging except the most demanding applications. I have received a number of replies. Boiled down, the answers include:

1.) For quick & dirty, but usable work prints, a laser printer producing 600+ dpi;

2.) For high quality, a dye sublimation printer; and

3.) An intermediate would be a laser printer with one of the after market enhancement boards that runs the lasers resolution up to 1,200 dpi or "2,400 dpi equivalent", whatever that means;

4.) A fourth suggestion two or three people made was the Harris PhotoPro 2000 Gray Scale Digital Printer. This is a $10,000.00 silver salt laser printer that claims only 256 dpi, but each dot has 256 gray levels available. It was stated that the cost/print was less than $1.00. Do any of you have any experience with this latter machine, and would you be willing to share your thoughts? Does the increased contrast resolution make up for the POSSIBLY low spatial resolution? Do I really want to spend ten big ones on a black & white printer?

Joiner Cartwright, Jr., Ph.D.
joiner@bcm.tmc.edu

In response to last years questions raised on the performance of digital printers I tested several printers with a 1Kx1K image. Printer performances were compared at the level of whole page images and 10x enlargements of the printed images (LaserJet, Lazar Print, Dye sub,). Results are available at

In conclusion, you have to ask how many lines per inch are printed and at how many gray levels (not always the same as dots per inch), plain paper or special paper, permanence of the print, printing time, printing costs. I print 300 lpi at 256 gray levels (4,800 dpi) on plain paper in 20-45 sec for 1-10 MB of images per page at 3 cents per page with a HP LaserJet and enhancer board in archival quality.

Klaus-Ruediger Peters, Ph.D.
e-mail: Peters@BSAC.UCHC.EDU

We offer a imaging system that provides true photographic quality images from digital files. It is FDA class I approved and works on an Ethernet configuration as well as up to 4 video inputs. It can produce a range of 4,320 grayscale levels. You can print 1,2,4,6,or 9 images on a single page. the cost per 8x10 sheet is $1.60. I am attaching a overview and a list of features and benefits.

You may call me at 804 254 1011 or reply via e-mail to

warrenj1@polaroid.com.

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