Today's charity shop bargain (of sorts), also writing and TV blah blah blah...

[ffutures]

The bargain(?) was a Canon Selphy CP400 A6 photo printer with three cartridges and several packs of printing card for £25. As far as I can tell it's completely incompatible with Windows 7 (though Gutenprinter drivers allegedly work) but I managed to get it to work on the iBook eventually.

And all I can say is that although the quality isn't too bad, this has got to be the slowest printer I've ever seen, by a VERY wide margin. It feeds the card through backwards and forwards four times, once for each colour and once for a protective top layer. Paint drying has nothing on it.

So while this works, I can't see it being incredibly useful. I'll probably use up the current ink film cartridge then sell it on, if I can find someone who wants it.

One of the things I discovered while I was trying this was that the iBook was down to its last 3gb of hard disk space. However, it turned out that there were nearly 4000 files in trash! Deleting them leaves me with 46 gb free, a fairly substantial improvement. ALWAYS take out the trash!

In other news, I've been writing more - may actually have a story finished soon, crossing the Whoniverse with a fandom I've never touched before, and more of the Dexter / NCIS saga - and have written more for the next Forgotten Futures. And watched too much TV over Xmas.

Dr Who was disappointing but OK. Ditto this week's Sherlock - it felt a bit self-indulgent, to be honest, but I enjoyed it - but given there will only be three episodes again I decided I might as well get caught up on Extruded Sherlockian Product and have been working my way through Elementary. For some reason I only watched part of the first episode when it first aired then lost interest, but now I really can't remember why I initially disliked it. It isn't really too bad provided you more or less forget about Sherlock Holmes and think of it as something vaguely like Castle.

And so to bed...

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

It's a dye-sub printer, so it's useful for some things that you can't do with inkjet. Chief amongst these is that your prints are waterproof. But I think small photo printers like this lost their charm when photo finishing companies got their act together on 6x4" photo pricing from digital prints. At the time this was released, the cost per print was about 24p but Boots or Jessops would charge you 50p. Now the cost per print is about 24p but online photo shops will charge you about 3p, and the print quality would be much better.

I have a slightly better printer of this kind (a HiTi), and you're persuading me that I should get rid of it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was afraid of that - but I hadn't realised it's got so cheap to get them printed on line. Oh well, another white elephant. Definitely one to flog once I've played with it a little more.