Picked up this £2000 dye-sublimation printer the other day for £15, you certainly can still pick up bargains on ebay if you wait long enough!
Cool design. But how much is the ink?
Totally reasonable. Around $120 for a pack for 200 A6 prints (both ribbon and paper), or $80 for 240 10x9cm prints.
Are you going to transfer the prints to something?
This is a (medical) photo printer, you can't re-transfer from the photo paper.
Dye sublimation for transfers doesn't use dye sublimation in the printer. Instead, another printing technology (like inkjet) is used to print the "raw" dye-sub ink onto transfer paper. Then the transfer paper is pressed under heat to the final product (e.g. fabric), which is where the dye sublimation process occurs. The diffusion that happens in this step causes the tiny inkjet droplets to blur, resulting in a smooth, continuous-tone print on the final product.
In a dye-sub photo printer, the dye-sub ink is already deposited onto a ribbon, and then a thermal printhead sublimates it onto the paper, so the print is the final product.