A bit of playing around with the toy instant camera with thermal paper this evening.
A friend had a bunch of left over thermal paper from her father's estate. There are old rolls of 5cm stuff and two big rolls of old 8.5" fax machine stuff.
Trying it out! Not sure what the shelf life is like. It is likely decades old.
Print settings are dark, normal, light and dot-matrix. In the pic, dark is at the top, and the normally very light and pixelated.
The left column is the standard paper that comes with the camera. Middle is the very old (calculator?) roll, and right is the old fax ppr hand trimmed.
The cat pic is prob a bit dark, being shot in the dim livingroom just now.
Ok, I caved and bought that $32 “instant” digital camera that prints on thermal paper.
It’s a weird and wonderful shitty camera. The printer is pretty good, using error diffusion dithering but a bit slow. It’s apparently a 12MP camera that can also do 1080p video on the included 32GB SD card. Obs targeted at kids with the built in filters but there’s something about the immediateness that’s fun about it. Wonder how hackable it is?