18 Feb 2015 Pizza   » (Master)

Progress on the Shinko S1245, S6145, and S6245

A few weeks ago, a kind gentleman at Sinfonia sent me a pile of documentation on their S1245, S6145, and S6245 printers.

The S6145 and S6245 use a similar command language to the S2145, but the S1245 is quite different. So I decided to start with the latter, and created a new backend for it. It's now complete, but needs testing.

Support for the S6245 will probably follow, likely added into the existing S2145 backend as most of their code will be shared.

Unfortunately, the S6145 is another matter. While its command language is quite similar to the S2145, it has some peculiar data format requirements.

While the spool data is packed 8-bit RGB, the printer driver (aka our backend) is expected to convert it to 16-bit planar YMC+L data. That is easy enough to accomplish, except the data also needs to be massaged via an unknown algorithm combined with an opaque data blob that the printer supplies.

If this sounds familiar, it's because that sounds eerily similar to what the Mitsubishi K60/D70/D707/D80 printers require, complete with a file providing the raw lamination data and pile of tabular data that feeds into the transformation algorithm. This is strong evidence that the S6145, the CIAAT Brava 21, Kodak 305, and those Mitsubishi models all use the same basic print engine.

The Sinfonia rep wasn't able to provide any further details on the algorithm, though he did provide a set of binary x86 and x86_64 libraries that perform the necessary transformations. So it's a sort of bad news, good news situation.

Anyway. At this point, the S1245 backend is ready for testing, and since I can't justify buying yet another high-end photo printer, that means I'll need a volunteer to test this stuff out.

In the mean time, I'll probably work on support for the S6245, which will also eventually need testing. Then I'll move on to the S6145, get the core backend in place, then teach myself some x86_64 assembly and get to reverse-engineering the necessary algoritms and maybe eventually get somewhere.

So, does anyone have a spare S1245, S6245, and/or S6145 printer to toss my way? It's for a good cause!

Syndicated 2015-02-18 04:17:51 from Solomon Peachy

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