Hello. I've always been looking forward to have a portable monochrome
thermal printer. It had been a dream for many years until Planon
Printstik PS900 Portable Thermal Printer appear on the market. I believe
it's the first of this kind. I almost purchased it until I see it's
paper pack is sold at extremely expensive price: $22.99 for 60 pages.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...e_Thermal.html

My question is, can someone with knowledge of thermal printer tell me,
if these thermal monochrome paper are almost the same? If so, I should
be able to fill in ordinary fax roll paper. Otherwise this printer is
not my option.

I find it hard to understand the paper refill pack have to be so
expensive. I've seen very small fax machines, and was lead to believe
there are no big trouble in mechanism to print to fax paper with small
machine. I believe the expensive paper refill is purely a marketing trick.

Best regards

On 2011-06-13, Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu+(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Hello. I've always been looking forward to have a portable monochrome
> thermal printer. It had been a dream for many years until Planon
> Printstik PS900 Portable Thermal Printer appear on the market. I believe
> it's the first of this kind. I almost purchased it until I see it's
> paper pack is sold at extremely expensive price: $22.99 for 60 pages.
>
> http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...e_Thermal.html
>
> My question is, can someone with knowledge of thermal printer tell me,
> if these thermal monochrome paper are almost the same? If so, I should
> be able to fill in ordinary fax roll paper. Otherwise this printer is
> not my option.

The link you point to describes it as a thermal transfer printer
but that did not ring true - thermal transfer is a plain paper
process. Looking it up on the manufacturer's site confirmed it is
a direct thermal printer. As such I'd imagine thermal fax paper
will be fine, although you'll probably need to rewind standard
rolls onto the cores that paper is supplied with - they must be
pretty skinny to fit inside the printer.

I've used fax rolls with the roughly comparable Pentax Pocketjet
in the past. That uses cut-sheet thermal paper but is semi-difficult
to get hold of, especially in A4, and like this, relatively expensive
(last packs of paper I bought were £10-12/100 sheets here in the
UK). Worked fine for temporary rough stuff (mainly source code
listings for me) but thermal fax paper isn't really correspondence-quality.
The Pentax cut sheet paper was a lot better in that regard.

--
Andrew Smallshaw
(E-Mail Removed)