One type of inkjet printer that we haven’t heard too much about is standalone compact photo printers. They started appearing on the market around the same time that at-home photo printing took off, but today they still only make up a relatively small portion of the photo printing market. Even though a lot of people like printing their own photos, so far they haven’t seemed to be totally on board with owning a printer that probably just prints 4 x 6s and nothing else. Companies like Kodak, HP and Canon make an effort to have their customers use their cameras and then hook up those cameras to their compact printers and print with their ink on their paper. Since we haven’t provided too many reviews on any of these kinds of printers so far, we thought we would point out an article in the NY Times that takes a look at five of these printers.
They take a look at the HP Photosmart 475, the Lexmark P450, the Canon Selphy CP170, the Kodak EasyShare 500 and the Epson PictureMate Deluxe. They don’t do any real in depth testing on the machines, but they compare the basic and important stuff like print quality, print speed and general usability. They don’t declare a clear winner, but their top choices are the Kodak and the Epson. Like with most other printers, Lexmark disappoints. They note that the HP has “gadget appeal” but that it is slow and its first print jobs all jammed. The Canon had potential but it had some technical issues.
The Epson and Kodak machines both run about $200, so they right around the same price as some regular photo printers.
Anyone out there own a compact photo printer?
The Joys and Pitfalls of One-and-a-Half-Minute Photo Processing [NY Times]
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3 Comments about “Compact Photo Printers”
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July 5th, 2006 at 10:34 am
I own the HP Photo smart 475, and so far I really like it, and have had NO problems with jamming or anything else. The reason I chose it, is because it stores more photos than most the other brands, and it prints 5X7 photos as well as 4X6 photos. My daughter has the Espson Picture Mate and we printed the same picture on both printers, and could tell no difference, and it took about the same time to print them.
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:43 am
very bad
May 12th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
I owned the Hewlett Packard 335, and it did well but it became jammed and I couldn’t unjam it, so that was that. I replaced it with an Epson PictureMate Pal (PM200), and found out later on it’s highly rated. I’ve liked it so far. It does seem like it should be less suspectable to jamming, as the paper feeder doesn’t have a spring-operated flap like the HP did. I also like its simpler software, it doesn’t take some 5 minutes to install like HP’s did and it has far fewer settings to goof with as well.
The only drawback, to me, of the Epson is that its cartridge is on the back, not as easy to swap. Its USB PictBridge jack also won’t show photos loaded on a jump drive, never tried that with the HP so I don’t know.
I also do like how the Epson only costs 25c per print (HP was around 29-30c), the only thing is that the ink/paper pack you buy seems to be sold in fewer stores than the one for the HP. Also, the printer is larger than the HP. Overall, though, I like it better.