Selphy CP780 Photo Printer

Fantastically sharp and richly colored photos are typical for Canon printers, but for the price--under a hundred dollars--there was no reason to expect that pictures would look as good as they do from the Canon Selphy CP780. A Bluetooth adapter and battery are optional equipment (if you wanted both, you'd add about $130 onto the price) so it's not the kind of printer you can bring anywhere--but the price and the quality of the prints are both fantastic!

Recently I tested the Sony DPP-FP97 Digital Photo Printer which I thought was a decent and easy to use compact printer. Its major drawback was its price--pushing $200. That reservation became even more serious after testing this printer, the Canon Selphy CP780. Like the Sony DPP-FP97, it's a dye-sublimation printer (it requires a special ink ribbon as well as special paper) that allows printing from a wide variety of media; and like the DPP-FP97 it offers good quality prints. But the Selphy is more than a hundred dollars cheaper, so unless you're a die-hard Sony fan, you'll find a much better value here.

Again like the DPP-FP97, a 4x6 photo took just about one minute to print. Because it's a dye-sublimation printer, the photo comes out of the printer and is pulled back in several times to add new colors to the print. Photos print out with astoundingly rich and deep colors, and were as sharp as any printed photos I've ever seen.

Canon's Selphy software, which guides you through the printing process, is handy when it comes to adding frames, text balloons, and clip art to photos. It talks out loud, which is a bit irritating, and while a print job is underway is offers tantalizing print ideas like printing a calendar--but how to do so is not explained. The LCD is not tiltable and is smaller than the Sony printer's 3.5" screen. And while the Sony offered a way to connect directly to a television, there's no similar option here. Still, I'm not sure how popular those features are to begin with.

One problem is that images seem to be slightly cropped and even more so on the edges (where the edge of the photo paper tears off), so for images that are off center, you risk losing a part of the picture. There was no obvious way to correct this problem.