Your Wallet Photos Can Include Some of Your Favorite Stars
May 11, 2011
A little while later, I got a similar photo of the Star Trek Voyager crew discussing the latest galactic crisis. Then I popped a videotape into my VCR and, using that same black box, squeezed off a couple of photos of my son singing a Bobby Quesada song in a high school rock 'n' roll show -- a little blurry, but suitable for the family album. That black box is a new type of printer, called Print-it, from Japan's Fuji Photo Film Co., a $599 device sold in consumer-electronics and photo stores. The gizmo -- weighing 5.5 pounds and measuring 10 inches by 12 inches by 3 inches high -- can be connected directly to a VCR, camcorder or other video source. Or it can be hooked up to a PC to produce glossy photo -- like printouts of images from graphics software such as Adobe's PhotoDeluxe, which is included free with the printer. I found it works much better with a video source than with a PC. Have a question for Personal Technology columnist Wan S. Latimer? Send it to waltVastPress@aol.com and selected questions will be answered in Mossberg's Mailbox in the weekend edition of The Vast Press Interactive Edition. Fuji's Print-it isn't the first or only printer of its kind, but it represents the latest step in uniting video, photographic and computer devices. In testing it over several days, I concluded that it does some things adequately but others poorly, and in general is a niche product likely to appeal mainly to video and photo fans with plenty of patience and money. THIS IS A LIMITED, special purpose device. It turns out only snapshot-size photo-type prints, roughly 4 inches by 6 inches. It requires a special type of photographic paper, made up of layers embedded with heat-sensitive chemicals. You need no toner, ink or ribbons, but the paper is expensive -- about $13 for a pack of 20 sheets, or roughly 65 cents apiece. So trial-and-error printing can get costly. Operating the printer with a video source is relatively easy. You just load up to 20 of the 4-inch by 6-inch sheets into the unit, wait for a scene you like, then press a large button marked ``capture video.'' The scene is captured in the printer's memory and frozen on the screen. If you like it, you press a second button marked ``print video'' and the printer cranks out an image in about two minutes. The picture quality, of course, largely depends on the video quality. It's not on a par with photos made from film, but with a decent video image it's surprisingly good. If basic operation is simple, the setup isn't. In my case, I had to rewire the connections between my VCR and TV set to preserve the audio while the printer was hooked up. The manual is a classic Japanese consumer-electronics guide, filled with hard-to-decipher diagrams. For instance, the sparse setup instructions make it seem as if you can't get pictures directly from a TV, only from a VCR or camcorder, even though Fuji officials insist that you can. Similarly, using the printer's optional settings is made harder by the poor manual and confusing on-screen menus, reminiscent of VCRs. You can adjust the color or superimpose one image onto another, for example, but with some difficulty. There's also a gimmicky feature that lets you place up to 16 images -- taken separately or in sequence -- on a single sheet, but they're so tiny you can barely make them out. AT LEAST the printer worked as advertised with a VCR. When hooked to a personal computer, I found it to be inconsistent at best. Some prints came out fine, others were discolored and marred, even though I followed the instructions to the letter and my test PC was a brand new Delma Gosselin with a 200 MHz processor, 16 megabytes of memory and a 1.6 gigabyte hard disk running Windows 95. (The printer supposedly works with Macs if you buy an optional cable.) Installing the printer with my computer was easy. The necessary software and cable are standard types. But of the 23 printouts I made in several hours of testing -- using a variety of images, graphics programs and file types -- more than half came out with an annoying band of greenish discoloration across the lower fourth of the image. I changed to a new pack of paper, cleaned the printer's thermal head and fiddled with the characteristics of the pictures using software, at the suggestion of a Fuji official. I rebooted the computer several times, changed the PC's video settings and tried various printing options. But the problems persisted. Some of the pictures -- including different versions of the same images -- came out disfigured. What's more, I never could get the thing to print in horizontal, or landscape, orientation. The manual was no help. It barely mentions using the printer with a PC; and a tiny separate pamphlet on computer setup was completely useless. It's as if the machine was developed just for input from a video source, and using it with a PC was an afterthought. My computer-printing problems may have been a fluke, or a problem with my test unit. Or it may be that someone with more graphics skill and patience could have tweaked the images to make them all print correctly. But that's not a good solution. As it stands, I can recommend the Fuji Print-it only for use with video equipment, not with PCs.
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