Product Reviews

Canon first introduced the sit-up-and- beg Selphy ES1 printer just over a year ago and it has enjoyed sufficient success for the company to follow it up with a cheaper, improved model. Coming in at more than £50 cheaper than the ES1, the ES20 follows the lines of the earlier machine in ice-white plastic and has a smoothly curved top, offering its 76mm LCD display at a convenient angle for viewing. There's a spring-loaded carrying handle too.

Ranged around the display are controls for direct processing of photos. The printer is well-endowed with memory card readers behind a flip-down cover at the bottom of its front panel and can take all the common types.

As well as selecting images for print, you can crop them, apply filters such as black-and-white or sepia print and add fun extras including borders and speech balloons. You have to write the text by hand in the latter though.

As well as input from memory cards there's a USB socket at the side for Mac connection. But sadly missing from the ES20 is the ES1's pull cord miniature PictBridge plug, which was enough to connect most digital cameras.

The printer's neatest feature to anybody with a technical turn of mind is its paper feed. The 15 x 10cm photo blanks are held inside the

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ES20 in landscape mode but print in portrait mode. To make the transition, the printer feeds each sheet out sideways and turns it through 90° before printing. It's magic to watch.

It's all very well having the photo cartridge held internally so you don't have to carry a pack of paper around with you, but you still need a spare pocket for the black brick that is the power supply - plus access to a mains socket. And to be truly portable you must spend another £25 on the optional battery pack and charger, which can handle a full 50 prints per charge.

The only consumable, a cartridge holding enough dye ribbon and print blanks for 50 prints, slides in behind a pop-open cover in the right side of the printer. It's supremely easy to fit and a lot simpler than loading paper and inks into an inkjet unit.

Under test, prints took around 80 seconds - quite a bit slower than typical inkjet times. The paper passes through the printer four times to take the three-colour coatings and a clear UV protective layer. Print quality is very good, with none of the dottiness of inkjet, though by default colours were a little dark and needed to be compensated for. Graduated areas of colour benefit from dye sublimation, giving a very smooth transition from hue to hue.

Running costs are entirely dependent on the price of the print cartridge. The best offering from a Google search was a two-cartridge, 100-shot pack for £15.50, giving a cost per print of 15.5p.

This compares reasonably to typical inkjet print prices, though some of the more popular models produce prints for as little as 12p a throw.

Summing up, this is another good, standalone dye-sub photo printer from Canon, though the fact that it still has no Leopard drivers may hold a few potential buyers back. Canon is due to release them within a month though.