Product Reviews

Dedicated photo printers, designed to produce 6 x 4in photos from a PictBridge camera, memory card or via USB from your Mac, are thick on the ground, but nearly all of them are inkjet-based. While there's nothing wrong with an inkjet print, it can be susceptible to fading in strong light and smearing if a print gets wet. Canon's Selphy printers are different.

The CP760 is a dye-sub printer and benefits from a number of neat features. For a start, its 2.5in LCD panel is well angled for viewing, and the diamond of five buttons in front of the screen makes menu navigation straightforward. There are just four other buttons, for power, print, menu and to back out from a menu option.

Set into the printer's front are three memory card slots, which between them cater for most of the common types. Set into the left-hand side is a PictBridge socket, so you can print directly from a camera and a USB socket for Mac connection. A cover on the right-hand side of the printer folds down, so you can load the film ribbon cartridge.

The ice-white case of the printer is matched by a similarly clad, external power supply and a white and clear cartridge for the photo paper. This is the only cumbersome part of the printer, as you have to clip it in place

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after folding down a flap at the front of the machine. There's no convenient way of clipping the cartridge to the printer for carriage, so you're left with three separate items to move around.

Printing photos from a memory card involves scanning through preview thumbnails on the LCD display and selecting those required. The printer then applies each of the three dye colours, before coating the complete print in a protective clear layer. Although each one has to make four passes through the printer, we managed to produce one in 76 seconds, and in just 64 seconds when printing from a camera. These are respectable speeds and compare well with those from dedicated inkjets.

The quality of prints is very high. There's a richness to light and dark shades, which enhances most images and detail is crystal clear. Print blanks as supplied by Canon are perforated top and bottom, to allow the printer to grip the paper. There's a 1mm overlap of the image at the top of each print and 2mm at the bottom, so any detail close to the edges may be lost when you tear off the perforated strips.

Printing costs are entirely dependent on the price of the consumables packs. Each pack contains a print film and photo paper for a set number of prints. They're available in 36, 72 and 108-print capacities, and the best economy comes from the largest pack. The lowest price we could find this for is £14.19 through Amazon, which gives a cost per print of 13.1p. This bears up well against typical costs for inkjet prints from other manufacturers.

There's little new in the mechanism of the Selphy CP760 and the case is mainly a cosmetic makeover, though there are some design improvements. Dye-sublimation print is a worthwhile alternative to inkjet for dedicated photo printing and Canon shows just how good a result you can get from it.