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Best All-Around Color Among Portable Dye-Sub Printers
Aside from Sony, many other brands make portable dye-sublimation printers these days, which makes the choice tougher. I did not consider purchasing the Dell, HP, Kodak, or Olympus ones because they are simply too big - I wanted one that I can comfortably bring with me on my travels, so I can print my own postcards to send home. I tried out the Canon CP-400 (form factor even smaller than the Sony DPP-FP30) in the store, and found that the print-outs (direct from my camera, not touched up by computer) have a blue cast to them, and in a side-by-side comparison the Sony print-outs (of the same pictures) have much prettier colors. And comparing to Sony's own older model DPP-SV77, which I have at home: The DPP-SV77 is bigger, complete with touchscreen LCD and Memory Stick/PC Card slots, built-in creativety functions such as printing calendars, and has a higher resolution of 403 dpi (the DPP-FP30 reviewed here, like the Canon models, only has 300 dpi). BUT the little DPP-FP30 actually prints photos with much truer color, while the big brother DPP-SV77 tends to exagerate reds and greens, and over-sharpen any edges. The lower resolution in the DPP-FP30 is not noticeable at all unless I print fine text to it from a computer, which is not this printer's intended purpose anyway. While I am very happy with the Sony DPP-FP30, I WISH IT COULD HAVE HAD (Sony, are you listening): - A battery option, so it's not necessary to carry the AC adapter or to be tethered to a power source when printing. - A button to toggle between bordered (no cropping) and borderless (cropped). - More creativety functions in the included software. - Without increasing the overall size by too much, add multi-type card reader slots and a small color LCD to choose pictures (better yet, ability to trim/crop them before printing). This would also eliminate the requirement that the digital camera must be PicBridge compatible. The other obvious shortcomings common to all portable dye-sub printers are that 1) paper/cartridge are prioritery and on the expensive side, and 2) print size is limited to a maximum of 4x6 (4x8 in some cases). These I accept for now, because I want the quality and durability of dye-sub prints (as opposed to inkjet prints). Hopefully these will improve with time. As no other printer today has everything I hope for (see above), I am still giving the Sony DPP-FP30 5 stars for its excellent quality prints. Awesome!!!! I've had this printer for a few months now and I've never seen a better one!! The pictures look as good as the ones I got from a photoshop here in town. If I could give it more stars I would! AMAZING! This printer is amazing. I don't know why it is so cheap. The pictures are great, it is compact, and very easy to use. great little printer nice, small, compact printer. quality of the photos is great using dye sublimation printing. fun to watch the picture come together color by color. a little time consuming, but worth it. Awesome little printer I spent a lot of time reviewing these dye-sub printers. I rarely print from a memory card, so that feature was not important to me. Watching this thing do its magic is a lot of fun! 3 passes to apply color, then the last pass for the glossy coat. I got it mainly for its portable size. It is tiny! Another plus is that it comes with a paper pack and ribbon. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that the photos are a tad (just a tad) flat. I think it has more to do with the sony paper. My full size canon i960 makes a better print on the canon glossy paper. Other than that, this is a fantastic little device! | |
