Sony DPP-FP97 Digital Photo Printer

This Sony photo printer is fast and puts out gorgeous prints. But you'll need to be near a power source and if you want it to be truly portable, you'll have to invest extra in the Bluetooth option. You'll also pay a premium for the paper and ink refills. So for the price (right now around $200), you might want to consider other options, like the Canon Selphy. This printer is due out in May 2009.

The Sony DPP-FP97 Photo Printer is very compact, easy to use, and has a good variety of on-board editing functions. You can quickly print out digital photos onto 4x6 paper through a media card or PictBridge interface. It's not battery powered nor does it come with Bluetooth connectivity (you can buy an adaptor for another $30), which would make this much more on-the-road compatible; but in terms of quality and size, it's a very good photo printer.

A 4x6 photo took just about one minute to print. It's a dye-sublimation printer, so it uses a special ink ribbon. The photo comes out of the printer and is pulled back in several times to add new colors to the print. When it comes out, it's dry and the colors are startlingly real.

The printer, which is quite small, has a number of built-in options, allowing images to be quickly and easily touched up. Exposure, white balance, focus, skin smoothing, dodging, and of course red-eye removal are the options available at the touch of a button.

The printer gives a host of other options as well, such as printing a calendar, adding a frame, or using special filters (such as sepia or a fish-eye lens). I was unable to get these functions working when the printer was connected by the included USB cable to my laptop but they work when an image is printed from a memory card. The printer features a large, tiltable LCD which makes editing easier. And if you're in the party mode, you can operate the printer to a television with an HDMI cable.

I ran into some annoyances when trying to print from a laptop. While the computer found the printer right away, I needed to go to the advanced options tab of the printer to enable the printer to print the right size; otherwise I got an obscure and not very helpful error message telling me that the ribbon was the wrong size.