Canon Selphy CP780 [printer-friendly] • reghardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.com/2009/07/27/review_printer_canon_selphy_cp780/

Canon Selphy CP780

Lab quality photo prints at a price

27th July 2009 08:02 GMT

Review The Selphy CP780 is a tiny personal photo printer for producing lab-quality 6 x 4in prints. At just 176 x 132 x 75mm it can sit unobtrusively on a shelf or at the back of a drawer, ready to be brought out quickly for those occasions when you want an ad-hoc hardcopy of a photo you have taken with your digital camera.

Canon's Selphy CP780

Canon has resisted the urge to make the device cute at the expense of functionality, so it remains relatively plain, compact and rectangular. We tested the silver version; the white version would have been plainer still. If you want cuteness, buy the pink or blue versions.

Unfortunately, the impression of compact tidiness is destroyed when you plug in the power cable at the back and a USB cable at the side, leaving cables trailing in two directions across the table. Putting the two inputs together would have made the device appear classier.

A plastic paper cassette slots into the front of the unit, with a hinged flap on top acting as the output tray. The cassette is designed to hold any of a range of Canon-branded media including 6 x 4in photo cards, 100 x 200mm wide-format photo cards, and various sizes of stickers.

Embarrassingly enough, we spent several minutes trying to work out how to assemble the paper cassette parts, which were packaged separately, and it took some thought before we realised how the cassette was supposed to fit into the printer.

The optional Bluetooth adapter, shown here, is unnecessarily expensive at £40.

Canon might think the Selphy CP780 is perfectly intuitive but we think a little ‘getting started’ sheet would have been helpful here. There are little setup diagrams on one of the parts (the cassette lid, as it turns out) but they don’t make any sense until you have already put everything together. Yes, yes, it seems obvious *now*, but it didn’t at the time.

The Selphy CP780 is a dye-sublimation printer that uses a heated element to transfer colours from a roll of dyed film to the paper. The rolls are provided in user-replaceable cassettes. Since the dyes on the roll are sequential, the printing process sees each sheet pass through the carriage four times as each colour is applied cumulatively. This four-pass feeding action is handled automatically, the sheet being sucked back into the printer for each new pass.

The Bluetooth adapter port can also be used to connect a PictBridge-compatible camera

Three memory card slots are provided at the front. These support Secure Digital, MiniSD, MMC+, RS-MMC, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, CompactFlash and MicroDrive formats. The product details also list support for the Olympus xD-Picture Card format but this is not indicated on the printer itself, nor did we successfully manage to insert an xD card into any of the slots.

You can also connect a PictBridge-compatible camera to a port on the side or attach a computer via a conventional USB cable. Another option is to buy a special BlueTooth adapter designed for the Selphy and then print wirelessly. This sounds like an excellent idea, except for the fact that the BlueTooth adapter costs £40 – that’s about a third of the price of the Selphy CP780 itself. You could buy a full-size A4 inkjet printer for less than that.

For the full wireless experience, the device can be powered from a rechargeable battery that clips on to the back. It costs £74 – more than half the price of the Selphy CP780. Even without these add-ons, the Selphy CP780 is easy and, dare we say it, fun to use. Shortly after plugging in a camera or memory card, you can browse through your image thumbnails using the colour LCD status window on top of the unit.

The device prints using dye-sublimation roll packs

Choose your image and press the Print button: it is as simple as that. Additional buttons allow you to print multiple copies, adjust brightness and contrast, and even customise RGB values independently. You can also correct red-eye, add colour effects such as sepia and fit multiple images onto one sheet, all using the on-printer menus.

If printing from a computer, you can use Canon’s Selphy Photo Print software to superimpose silly cartoon decorations to your images or produce photo calendar cards. Annoyingly, this software refused to print anything shot on our Olympus E-420, curiously declaring that ‘The following image cannot be printed in the correct colours’. These pictures printed without problem using alternative software.

Three memory card slots support a very good range of formats, including thick ones such as MicroDrive

Prints produced by the device are excellent with perfectly smooth, dot-free continuous tones. It is not a fast device, taking more than a minute and a lot of whirring to produce one 6 x 4in photo, but this is significantly faster than the model’s predecessor, the CP760.

Verdict

The one problem, and it is a big one, is that the prints are expensive. A basic refill pack of 24 photo cards and dye-sub roll cassette costs £15: that’s 62p per print, not including the £129 price of the printer. Yet there is no denying the appeal of personal photo card printers in the home, and the Selphy CP780 is a particularly good example. It has a good range of memory card slots and lots of on-printer options, but is also child’s play to use for simple quick prints. ®