DYE SUB    OKI/ALPS 5000 SERIES UPGRADE SAVE £'S ! We have made 3D-printed alternative Dye-Sublimation upgrade blocks, which we sell under our Marketplace section as items K13-A or K13-B.    But you might want to perform a simple Dye-Sub upgrade yourself to fully enable your ALPS or OKI 5000 series printer... You need: Electrically conducting silver paint - available for instance from www.maplin.co.uk for £6.99 a pot. A small implement to dab it on with, such as a 1mm or 2mm flat blade screwdriver. Good eyesight and a steady hand. Perhaps some sticky tape for masking. I used my old pot of probably defunct "Electrolit" paint, which I've had for about twenty years to use with Hornby Zero 1 DCC chip coding - you had to paint over a combination of pads on an exposed circuit board edge to give the chip its binary code. Such paint is commonly used to repair circuit boards or car heated rear window tracks for example. The ALPS/OKI Dye Sub Upgrade Kit dongle "key" is just a simple plug. Although nobody can seem to find for them for sale as a computer part - they look like a 40-pin circuit board edge connector, somewhat SCSI or centronics plug-like, but smaller. In any case though, all it does is short out 5 pins! Now if they were being really tricky these pins would not have been chosen to be all next to each other. So how can you fix it and save yourself much cash... Arrange yourself to look at the back of the printer, and the left hand shorter side of the D-type smaller socket (behind a plastic break-off lug originally). Five pins near the bottom on the left need to be joined by a strip of conducting paint - pins 14 through 18 counting from the top - i.e. leave the bottom two pins untouched. To make the job easier, you could apply some sticky tape either side of the area to avoid any over painting. It is very small and you need a steady hand and good lighting to see what you are doing. I used a small screwdriver to pick up a blob of the silver (more silver less lacquer settled from the bottom of the pot) and stroked the blob carefully over the pin tips - not on the top of the centre board, and not down deeper into the socket. Allow half an hour to dry. Print a test page to show the upgrade is working - have the normal CMYK ink ribbons and a sheet of paper loaded press and hold the ready/feed button for four seconds, let go and press it again once quickly. The test page shows for example "DP-5000D" (for ALPS it's "MD-5000P" as in the manual) and adds Dye Sublimation printing to the list of capabilities. You will need to un-install any printer driver and reload the special dye-sub driver, then the driver will show the dye-sub mode printing options. The fix could be undone - you should be able to scratch off the paint if ever desired. If you found this useful, saving you being ripped off for the original part at now inflated eBay prices, avoiding damage to your precious printer with dismantling it to hard solder the pins inside, then by all means send me a donation by clicking on the button below - then complete the usual PayPal steps - maybe buy some of my wares...