Naked Selphy Fun

I’ve mentioned the Canon Selphy CP400 before. Although that time I got the name wrong. Its a really nice little dye sublimation printer which works a treat. And the paper and the ink are nice and cheap too. As part of my portable Pi Camera project I thought I’d get one to make a portable printer that works with the camera. I had a bit of fun getting the Selphy to work with the Pi but eventually I figured it out. You have to re-compile the Gutenberg suite to knock it back one version because the latest one breaks the paper size recognition. But I expect you already know that.

Anyhoo, I found a printer being sold for a fiver. In the original box. So I made the purchase, paid 6 pounds for postage (mutter mutter) and the printer arrived today. Turns out that “in original box” is not the same as “working”. Who knew? I got out my original one to make sure that all the drivers were in place and, sure enough, the five pound printer was getting stuck half way through a print.

I wandered downstairs for a disconsolate coffee and then, since I had not much to lose, I went back up to the office and took the lid off the printer to see if there were any wires dangling loose or bits of paper in the way. It looked OK so I tried to print again. And it worked. Yay! I popped the lid back on and it kept working.

So I went downstairs for a celebratory coffee and then returned to the office to tidy up. And I discovered that I’d taken the lid off the wrong printer, and I’d been testing the one that wasn’t broken. Can you see a pattern forming here from film fun on Monday? I’d be a bit concerned about incipient mental decay if I didn’t know that I’ve been doing this kind of stupid thing for the last sixty years.

Anyhoo, I took the lid off the broken printer and it worked fine. But only with the lid off. At this point I was too annoyed with the universe to do much more. So I put the new printer back in its box (it seems to like it there). The good news is that the plan is to move the printer into a custom case with a battery pack and whether it has a lid on it doesn’t make any difference to that application.

In all seriousness, these are cracking little printers and beautifully made (as you can see above). The only thing missing really is Wi-Fi. But you could add that by just attaching a Pi.

Using an Old Printer on Windows 11

A while ago I got a cheap colour printer. I’ve been using it on Windows 10 and it works a treat, but on Windows 11 things are a little bit more complicated. You can install the printer drivers that you can find here and you can print OK. But if you reboot your computer the drivers might vanish (it’s happened to me) and you have to install them again.

Worse, sometimes the install fails with an error about things already being in use. I asked ChatGPT for help and it came up with this which worked for me.

Canon Selphy 4000 for Cheap Colour Printing

Selphy Portrait (sorry)

After having watched a video of someone using a portable printer at an expo and producing large, high quality colour prints to order for the folks there I thought I’d investigate the possibility of obtaining a cheap printer to maybe put in a box. Instant camera pictures are all very well, but they are a bit variable in quality, expensive and hard to duplicate. I had a look on “the world’s favourite on-line auction site” and found that I could pick up a used Canon Selphy 4000 for well less than 20 quids. A bit of research convinced me that I could drive it from a Raspberry Pi Zero and even make it into an Apple Airprint device if required. So I bought one.

It arrived today. For giggles I checked to see if there was a Windows 10 driver for it. There wasn’t (boo) but it turns out that the Windows Vista 64 bit drivers you can find here worked fine with my copy of Windows 10 (yay!). The printer I got even had some ribbon and paper with it. The image above doesn’t really do the printer justice. The printed picture is vibrant and really nice to look at. You can get Canon branded film packs delivering 36 images for around 12 quid from Cartridge People. They even sent me a free deck of cards with my first order. Next step is to start designing a case to carry everything around in.