 
By John Morris Executive editor, CNET Reviews (2/10/03) A good digital camera is a must-have for new parents, right up there with diapers and bottles. OK, maybe it's not quite that important, but since my son was born a little more than a year ago, we've snapped literally thousands of pictures--mostly of him just sitting there, staring at us. Yet as his slightly annoyed grandparents constantly remind us, nearly all of those shots have never ventured off our hard drive. Not that we can't print out our photos. After all, we have a decent photo inkjet printer, the Epson Stylus Photo 820 that, in theory, is capable of producing nice prints. In practice, however, the process has turned out to be more complex and error-prone than I expected.
So goes the thinking behind snapshot printers from companies such as Canon, HP, Olympus, and Sony. Because of their size, these printers are sometimes confused with portable inkjets such as the HP Deskjet 450cbi, but as the name implies, snapshot printers are designed for just one purpose: printing great 4x6-inch or smaller pictures at home or on the road. Most of them also use a different print technology from inkjets, called dye sublimation, to produce sharper, more durable snapshots. I've been testing the Canon CP-100, a new $200 model that the company has been pumping in print ads everywhere. The CP-100 is much smaller than a typical printer, measuring about 7 inches square and 2.4 inches high. It can print bordered or borderless snapshots, 4x6 inches or smaller, directly from compatible Canon digital cameras using an included cable. (You'll need an additional, optional cable to print from your PC.) Out of the box, you get only a starter pack of ink and paper, but additional paper comes in packs of 18 or 36 sheets. Unlike inkjet papers, these paper packs include the color ink cartridges rated for the same number of prints. Ultimately, each 4x6-inch print costs around 50 cents, about the same price I pay for online processing--without the wait. It takes about 80 seconds to print a borderless 4x6-inch print and about half that time for smaller prints. The optional battery and car adapter turn the CP-100 into a portable, if pricey, print lab.
Print quality is another big plus. Not all snapshot printers use dye sublimation--the HP Photosmart 130 and Photosmart 230, for example, are shrunken inkjets--but most do. In contrast to inkjets, which play tricks with the position and size of dots to build up gradients of color, dye-sub printers transfer color dye in continuous tone from a ribbon onto the paper in a series of passes. In other words, each dot or pixel can be washed out or saturated with color--something an inkjet only simulates. This is why a 300dpi printer such as the CP-100 can rival a 2,400dpi photo inkjet for photo quality. In the case of the CP-100, specifically, you can watch the paper shuttle back and forth as the printer layers on yellow, magenta, and finally cyan (blue). Inkjets have certain image-quality advantages over dye-sub printers, including a true black (the K in CMYK, oddly enough), but to my untrained eye, the results using the CP-100 in tandem with the fantastic Canon PowerShot S45 looked more like what I'm used to getting from a photo lab than anything I've been able to get from a photo inkjet. But more important, the process seemed more reliable; what I saw on the camera's display looked like what I got in print. Plus, the CP-100's final pass over each shot is a clear coating that makes the print more durable and resistant to liquids. When my son spilled a few drops of milk onto a 4x6 postcard print, I just wiped it off; try that with a fragile inkjet print. One final advantage of dye subs is that there are no ink nozzles to get clogged up. If snapshot printers are so great, why do they make up (according to NPD Intelect) only 3 to 5 percent of the market? These printers have some obvious limitations: they can't print anything larger than 4x6 inches, for instance, and each model works only with select digital cameras. For example, the CP-100 works with 11 Canon PowerShot models only. And if you're the sort who likes to fiddle around with pictures--adjusting the color, cropping, removing red-eye, and so on--you'll still want to first transfer images to your PC and use an image editor before printing, since cameras provide only the most basic options. But the biggest barrier is price, according to InfoTrends analyst Kerry Flatley, who notes that after shelling out hundreds of dollars for a digital camera, memory card, and other accessories such as card readers, few consumers have cash left over for a snapshot-only printer. (Tellingly, HP, which sells the least expensive models, is also the current market leader.) Instead, most people will continue to print small batches of photos at home, she says, and use online services, such as Ofoto and Shutterfly, or retailers equipped for digital photography for bigger batches. But if money's no object, a snapshot printer is a great complement to your existing inkjet or laser printer.
John Morris is an executive editor for hardware and software coverage at CNET. Have a question for him? Let us know!
 
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
