Mini-Typecasts?

When viewed at full resolution the text is easily readable



Here's a closeup of the Zink print:



Note my chicken-scratch fountain pen scrawl to the right, for scale comparison.

While the Zink prints are fun, they're not gallery-quality. The paper uses a thermal technology, embedded in the coating, that responds to various heat levels with a spectrum of colors. Naturally I was interested to see what would happen with monochrome images. If near gray, like with a traditional black-&-white image, it appears to have difficulty rendering the image without bands of colored streaks; I suppose gray isn't one of those colors the paper responds with easily. Take the following set of prints, also stuck in my notebook:



The top image was captured on my Lumix G5 in Dynamic Monochrome mode (no color tint), then transferred to the iPhone and the "Casablanca" preset filter applied within the Zink software. Not too bad, actually. Yes, the image is contrast-rich, as is the nature of the Lumix Dynamic Monochrome mode. But I like it.

Now consider the bottom image. Again captured in Dynamic Monochrome on the G5, I edited the photo on the iPhone's Photos app with a bit of "warmth" prior to printing via the Zink app. The paper responded to the gray sky with a rainbow of colors. It's not what I expected, but rather interesting. I wouldn't call it "bad," unless you don't want those colors smeared across the face of a portrait subject. As it is, this could just be some apocalyptic storm blowing in on a sci-fi like landscape.

You can see similar color streaking in the rendering of the typecast sheet. The original paper was the light yellow/green engineering paper, but the color tones are so subdued that, again, the Zink print responds with a seemingly random splash of tones. I think where this paper works better is with brightly colored scenes of various tones, your typical point-&-shoot subject.

I'd be interested to hearing if you have any novel ideas for these mini-typing prints. Stay well.

My video about crafting with Zink prints: