The new HiTi 640PS takes much of its design cues from the PhotoShuttle,
another printer from Hi-Touch
Imaging Technologies, but in this case finished in an unusual electric
blue colour. The 640 PS is a Windows (98/98SE/2000/XP)
compatible printer, and a new addition to the company's product line.
It is positioned one rung above last year's 630PS model,
the previous high-end consumer model. The 640PS offers an increase in
resolution over the 630PS, is physically a bit bigger than the 630PS,
and is compatible with a much wider range of memory cards.
HiTi specializes
in the production of Dye Diffusion Thermal Transfer (D2T2)
photo printers, and has blazed the trail in making not
only these high quality printers affordable, but their
supplies as well.
Until recently, high prices made the use of 4x6 photo printers more expensive
than simply having the photos printed at a store or by a printing service.
The arrival of HiTi printers, and the reasonable price of their supplies,
changed that.
D2T2 printers use a process
that applies 3 coats of colour, one after the other, to a
paper designed to receive them. The printer then overcoats
the colours with a film to protect the print from UV rays,
fingerprints and moisture. The result is a print that is
virtually indistinguishable from the output one gets from
a mini-lab.
What's in the box:
The 640PS comes very-well packed, in a box that contains: the printer,
its hand controller, the paper tray, both a USB printer cable and a power
cable, a CD with the driver and a printing utility called Photo Désirée,
and finally, a starter ribbon with 8 sheets of 6x4 paper and 2 types
of sticker sheets.
Supplies for the HiTi 640PS are common with other printers from the manufacturer's
consumer printer line such as the 630DL, 630PS, PhotoShuttle, and the new
HiTi Transphotable, a portable photo printer that can be run from the accessory
jack of a car.
The consumables for the
printer are a 50 image Photo Kit ($19.99 US), or
a variety of paper/ribbon kits for stickers of assorted
sizes (see the HiTi
site for details).
The package shown above is the standard photo paper kit,
which contains 50 sheets of paper separated into 2 packs
of 25 sheets, and, sealed in a foil pouch, the ribbon cartridge.
The printing system:
The ribbon is contained in
a plastic cartridge that simply slips into place in the printer.
Installation of the ribbon is considerably easier than the
replacement of ink tanks with ink jet printers, and no head
alignment needs to be performed, avoiding waste.
Each dye panel — yellow, magenta, cyan and the overcoat — are
placed sequentially on the ribbon. When printing starts, the paper receives
the yellow layer first, the magenta coat second, and the cyan layer last.
A final pass through the printer overcoats the print. Total time for the
printing process: 1 minute 25 seconds when printing from a computer.
The dye layers are applied
to the paper by the print head (1), a thermal printing
head.
The data for the print can originate either from a Windows computer, or
from memory cards placed directly in the printer.
The 640PS accepts a variety of memory cards in one of two slots (2)
located on the lower right of the printer.
CompactFlash (Types I and II),
Microdrives, SmartMedia, SM (Secure Digital) or MMC (MultiMedia),
or Memory Stick can be used. In addition, xD memory cards
can be used in a CF adapter.
The paper for HiTi photo printers — and
others such as Sony's
DPP-EX5 which has a generally similar design — is
special. It has edges at each end that need to be snapped
off once the print is made, and each end is of a different
length (see photo below).
Twenty-five sheets of photo paper fit into the tray, the wider tear-off
edge being placed towards the outside of the tray.
The tear-off edges must be used
to avoid touching the print area of the paper. The tray need
not be pulled out to be refilled as it has a flip-up transparent
lid that allows loading paper into it.
A 4x6 print occupies the entire width of the paper, and
the entire length once the ends are snapped off, creating
a borderless print.
Stickers are different. The sheets have no break-off ends, and have similar
sides, making it unimportant which direction — as long as they are
the right side up — goes in first.
Three types of stickers are available. 4 x 4, 4/2/4, and 1x1. The first
yields a sheet of 16 photo quality stickers (great for marking items),
the second yields 8 small stickers and 2 bigger ones, and the last yields
a single large sticker.
No computer? No problem
While some other printers can also print "stand alone", the HiTi
640PS is one of a handful that has its own 1.6 inch LCD screen. Using the
hand controller, the built-in printing interface can be used to make prints
of all types and edit photos.
As with the 630PS, the controller for the 640PS is connected to the printer
with a curly cord, allowing it to be removed so it can be used more comfortably.
The printer automatically detects when it is not connected to a computer,
and immediately shows its own interface on the LCD monitor, effectively
providing similar features to the ones available with the printer driver,
or PhotoDésirée, the included software.
When used in stand alone mode, the printer's interface presents 8 options:
Photo: Starts by showing full colour thumbnails
of the photos on the card, 4 to a screen. When one is
selected, the photo fills the screen and can be resized,
colour corrected, or adjusted.
ID Photo: Prints the selected image in multiple
copies on a single sheet, with from 4 to 16 copies of
the photo, perfect for passport photos and each size
is identified by its size in millimetres, a way commonly
used to set ID and Passport photos requirements.
Index Print: Prints an index (thumbnails) of
all the photos on the card, in either, 20, 30, or 56
thumbnails per page.
Sticker: Prints the selected photo on a special
sticker stock with an adhesive backing. 4 small photos
on either end of the sheet, and 2 larger photos, side
by side, in the middle; or a group of 4 x 4 small photos.
Quick Photo: Immediately presents the thumbnails
and prints the one selected without offering options
such as enhancing, resizing, or choosing the number of
prints to make.
DPOF: Reads and applies the DPOF (Digital Print
Order Format) information of the photo to print it. (Note
that not all DPOF settings set by cameras are compatible
with the 640PS.)
Print All: Prints all the photos found on the
card, one after the other, as single prints. Should the
paper run out, the printer asks for the tray to be refilled.
Setup: Provides options for:
Card select: to select the card slot to
use when more than one type of memory cards are
present in the slots.
Update firmware: allows updating the firmware
using a memory card to run the BIOS flashing utility.
(This can also be done from a computer, and HiTi
provides regular firmware updates for their printers).
Printer setting: has a number of sub-functions. Position
calibration (serves to calibrate the print
position with stickers), Printout Settings (brightness,
contrast, red/green balance, Blue/yellow balance,
sharpness, return to factory defaults, ok); Select matte
or glossy finish; Date Print (On or
Off); and Ok to register the choices.
LCD Adjustment: serves to adjust contrast,
brightness, red or blue saturation, horizontal
position of the photos or data displayed on the
LCD, or return the printer to its factory defaults. Ok,
the last option, returns to the previous menu.
Language: selects the interface language
from English, French, German, Italian, Japanese,
Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese.
Cleaning mode: Requires the use of a cleaning
ribbon, separately available from HiTi (see
the HiTi
siteconsumables area for the cleaning
kit).
About: displays the current Firmware's
version.
As is the case with the 630PS, the 640PS is only compatible
with JPEG format images when printing stand alone.
Printing other formats, such as TIFF, must be done from
a computer.
Printing from a computer:
When the printer is connected to the USB port of a computer, and the printer
is turned on, its LCD screen briefly flashes "PC Mode" as
it detects the presence of the computer, and disables its control panel.
The driver and software are both on one CD-ROM, but can be installed separately
if desired. The process is simple, but requires a re-boot to complete the
installation. Moreover, the printer should not be connected to the
computer during the installation of the printer driver.
Most image editing software supported by Windows will work with the print
driver for the HiTi 640PS. In addition, HiTi provides its own full function
photo printing utility, Photo Désirée.
The program supports all the
paper formats available for the printer: the standard 4 x
6 inch sheet, the various sticker combinations, and ID photos,
with from 4 to 16 copies of the photo on a single sheet.
PhotoDésirée's use is quite simple. Image selection is done
from the upper left window, and can be made from a variety of sources
such as card readers — including those on the printer — or
any disk drive on the computer.
The selected image is then moved
into the Layout window by clicking the yellow arrow
in between the two. At this stage the photo can be edited
using the Enhancer(see below). When ready,
the photo is then passed on to the Print Queue window
at the bottom, by clicking the yellow arrow below the layout
window.
Photo Désirée's
Image Enhancer can be used to adjust the output for a number
of parameters:
Brightness
Saturation
Contrast
Rotation
Sharpness
Resizing
Gamma correction
In addition, various borders and/or text can be added,
including monthly calendar overlays.
Print Quality
The most notable improvement the 640PS brings to the HiTi product line
is a 403 DPI resolution compared to the 300 DPI resolution of the 630PS.
The 403 DPI resolution of the 640PS is comparable to HiTi's professional 640DL
model, and yields a smooth and superbly detailed image. We should point
out here that to the naked eye, the increased resolution of the 640PS over
the 630PS is not obvious. Given a camera with a resolution of 3 or more
megapixel, to the unaided eye, all these printers produce images with no
visible pixels.
However, using a 6X printer's loupe, minute differences between
both outputs can be seen. For example, when a section of blue sky is seen
under magnification, tiny rows of pixels can be discerned in the 630PS
print, and these cannot be seen in the 640PS print.
Without any magnification, what is visible is that the 640PS print is slightly
brighter, and its colours a bit more vibrant.
In the examples below, we
have photographed the same image printed on each printer.
The image shown at left is a scan — reduced in size — of
the borderless 4 x 6 made by the 640PS. To show the differences
between each printer, a small section (the little red square)
has been photographed, cropped from photos made of each print.
The small red area shown in the print at left is shown below
at 100% scale.
The photos are both printed using the same paper batch and the same ribbon,
and using the printer's defaults. The area show below measures approximately
4 x 3 mm (0.156 x 0.117 inch) in the actual prints made with each printer.
630PS print
640PS print
It is worth highlighting here
that the area shown above is far too small for the details
shown here to be seen with the naked eye. Only the magnification
of a macro lens is able to reveal the differences. In reality,
the rows of pixels visible in the 630PS shown above are completely invisible,
and are even quite difficult to make out with a 6X printer's
loupe.
The photos produced by the 640PS are truly amazing. The print quality is
extremely high, and creates instant believers in digital photography out
of those who see them.
Nevertheless, a warning should be made that some dust can work its way
into the printer, and end up on the first print made if the printer has
been sitting uncovered for a period of time. Indeed, when left uncovered,
small specs of dust can get in through the ventilation slots. The solution
is simple, a small cover for the top of the printer prevents any dust from
marring the first print quite effectively.
At a price of $299 US, the 403 DPI 640PS is a bit more expensive
than others in the HiTi line-up. However, when the photos it produces are
looked at, few are likely to regret the extra money.
