Hello,

I have an old dye sub printer that I would like to use up the paper for... thing is that it takes a memory card and they prints off that. It only seems to understand old style JPEG compression. Is there a way to turn current jpgs back into the old style compression?

Thanks, Phil

most probably when you click on save as (or export) you can specify the format. But I have no idea what formats are supported by that printer. Probably tiff or raw or some other format would work. (please specify at least the type of that printer or the required format)

Erm like I said, it reads JPEG/JPG files with the old style compression. JEPG change the compression system not long ago and it doesn't read the new compression format. So selecting save or export as JPG doesn't work as todays software uses the new compression standard.

Its an Olympus P200.

have you tried with GIMP? it has loads of options for exporting jpg.
i recently accidentally checked "arithmetic encoding" or some such and my image viewers couldn't see the resulting files. maybe that's what you're talking about.

Nah, I am pretty sure it's not the encoding, files out of an old Powershot G5 from circa 2005 use Huffman encoding and they print. Something the same size and res from Gimp with Huffman encoding doesn't work.

Might be something else in GIMP, I haven't tried every possible combination.
Some other bit of encoding.

Maybe if I get GIMP from 2005 going....

I don't know, but you might be able to get somewhere with the ImageMagick suite of tools, and specifically identify and convert.

Online resources about these tools:
https://imagemagick.org/script/identify.php
https://imagemagick.org/script/convert.php
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#jpg

Try identify --verbose on one file that works, and one that does not. The output is lengthy, so you may wish to redirect the output to files and compare them like I did here:
Even the diff will be lengthy. Here is one difference, as an example:
I have no idea whether your printer cares about interlace, but it sounds important.

The third link I listed above gives some clues about how to change the JPG format. Carrying my example a bit further, I will change the interlace mode of the newer file:
and it's done. The image looks the same. The file size is slightly different.

If it's not interlace, it's something else. See what other differences there are.

And good luck!

2 members found this post helpful.

Ooo this looks promising. I can't check until later in the week but I will let you know! Cheers.

Hi all,

Figured this out, in GIMP 'Progressive' & 'Optimise' needed to be un-checked and then the printer works!

Thanks everyone.

Great!

I am pleased as I want to use the printer for an art project and bought a load of old paper of eBay!

Didn't want to have to buy an old camera too!