Product Reviews

HiTi may not be the first name on the lips of most consumers when looking for a printer that outputs postcard-sized photos, but the Taipei-based firm is one of a few to specialise in dye-sublimation printers rather than inkjet. Hi-Touch's latest offering is the 641PS, a desktop printer capable of colour or black-and-white prints, and stickers at 6 x 4in.

Hi-Touch goes as far as to claim the 404dpi of the 641PS is the equivalent to 6400dpi from an inkjet. That's difficult to substantiate, though the images produced are clearly high quality. Better still, a coating applied as the last stage of the process gives prints a finish that's smudge-proof and fade-resistant.

Setting up the device is no more difficult than an inkjet, though you have to load a print ribbon in a pull-down drawer on the fascia. No consumables are included, but ribbons and paper are sold together, so printing costs are known. At £16.95 (£14.41 inc VAT) for 50 sheets of 6 x 4in paper, including ribbon, that equates to 32p (28p) a sheet, which is comparable to high-street labs.

Two media bays at the front allow images to be printed directly from all memory cards, except for the tiny xD card in Fuji and Olympus models. With PTP (Photo Transfer Protocol) and support for PictBridge-compliant devices,

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prints can be made from a variety of sources, including Flash disks, card readers, hard drives and many cameras. We're not great fans of connecting cameras directly, as there's the possibility of corrupting images through loss of power, but we tried it with both the Fuji E550 and F810. Both worked and the print engine wasn't swamped by the 12-megapixel resolution of the E550 and F810. As far as using the card slots, or even connecting a Mac, the 641PS offers a wealth of printing options.

Using either the built-in 1.5in colour screen with the novel detachable handset or the downloadable PhotoDesiree software (PC only on the supplied disc), you can choose a number of editing and image enhancements, including image rotation, trimming and resizing. You can also fine-tune contrast and saturation. The 641PS can also print in black and white, and HiTi supplies special paper for this, but we found the standard colour paper perfectly adequate for this task.

You load paper into the cassette at the front of the device, which is then drawn into the printer's body where the ribbon is heated and the cyan, magenta and yellow dyes are transferred colour by colour in three layers. A fourth layer adds the protective coating, but even processing a full-sized 6 x 4in colour print made from a 1MB, 4-megapixel image can be achieved in one minute 50 seconds. You can even choose the finish of the final coating, including a luscious gloss or matte; a number of embossed patterns are also available, but we found them distracting. Print quality is undeniably impressive; our test images were razor-sharp, and colour, tonal range and detail were all first rate.

We've been impressed with HiTi printers before, and the 641PS doesn't disappoint. But while print prices compare favourably with inkjet and high-street labs, most users may find the price of the HiTouch a bit steep.