Well as it says, this is a casual review of said printer! I used this for what could have been a ‘professional’ shoot, in order to provide prints of group shots before the evening was over.

Out of the box…

Well first impressions were that the printer was smaller than I had expected! A diddy little thing, very cute. By I was disappointed to find that there was no USB2.0 cable to connect the printer to my computer. Also the power lead from the transformer to the mains was a European plug. Strange, but luckily I had a spare of the UK variety (standard 2pin thing many things use… like PS2s and Canon battery chargers :])

Plug and play

It most certinatly was! Very impressive, just install the driver, plug in the printer, open an image and it printed. Couldn’t get a lot better in this respect! Compatible and lovely.

Printing

It prints 6×4″s very quickly indeed, much faster than our home inkject anyway! At just over a minute and a quarter or so per page I found this to be more than adaquate, giving me enough time to prepare the next image for printing and stick the previous one in a frame. The quality is also very good indeed. Although sometimes the process misses out flecks of colour, its only noticeable on every 6th image or so. Provided you keep the paper and printer clean I’m sure this isn’t too much of a problem. Besides, I was running it quite intensively and couldn’t guarantee the place wasn’t too dusty. But either way, any defects on the images I printed were never noticeable enough to cause me to re-print them. An oddity about the printing is that it seems to make images sharper. A bit like the printer applies an unsharp mask (for you photoshoppers) before printing. Personally I didn’t mind this at all, it brings out definition in the images and makes my rubbish focussing look a bit better. Should be borne in mind though. The detail on all the prints was quite exquisite.

Dye-sub?

The way the printer actually makes the images was a little surprising to me. I didn’t realise that it doesn’t use an ink-jet style cartridge. The ink is on cling-film like sheets on the cartridge. One for each of the CYMK colours, the printer just overlays the ink onto the image one at a time. Very cool even if it is a horrible waste of ink! There’s enough ink sheet in one cartridge for exactly 36 prints, I think.

Overheating

I had the printer going more or less non-stop for about 2 hours. Only towards the end of this did a little window flick up on my screen saying the poor beast was getting a bit hot and I should wait for it to cool down. But this disappeared seconds later and it continued to print. So there was no problem here at all either.

Cost

This seems to be a bit of an outdated printer now and I’ve seen some going second hand for a mere £40! The printing cost per sheet works out to be around about 6.17p per sheet (using amazon.co.uk pricing). That is very impressive! And the extra £40 you pay for the printer is definitely worth it to be able to print images out anywhere you like, especially handy for event photography where it is a lot easier to hand out / sell photography at the end of the event rather than setting up a web gallery, contacting people etc etc etc…

Overall… 4.5 / 5

Well this is my first experience with a compact photo printer and I must say that I’m highly impressed! The advantage of being able to see instant results, rather than waiting to get prints back from a supermarket (only to find they’re pants), is reason enough alone to buy one. I didn’t manage to test out the direct camera > printer printing, but I hear that works perfectly well too! Highly recommended, a pleasure to use.