Product Reviews

While portable inkjet photo-printers continue to make inroads into the market that was at one time dominated by dye-sublimation devices, Canon uniquely offers both types. At a low £129, the Selphy CP710 is the company's top of the range dye-sublimation model and the only one with a multi-bay card reader and colour LCD for printing from memory cards.

The Selphy CP710 is compact, at 178 x 131mm, and just 63mm tall, it's around the size and weight of a Mac mini. Like rivals though, the footprint practically triples with the paper tray at the front and room required at the rear for the paper to pass over the heating element. Media prices are reasonable at 27p per print.

All the major formats are covered by the multi-bay card reader with the exception of xD, which excludes just about every current Olympus and Fuji camera, unless you opt for a pricey CompactFlash adaptor. Also, at 1.5in, the angled screen is smaller than most of the LCDs on Canon's compacts and digital SLRs. Nevertheless, it's essential for viewing images from camera memory cards. And it's perplexing why Canon has chosen to display each image as a thumbnail no larger than half the size of the LCD.

More worryingly, though, is the lack of

ADVERTISEMENT

built-in colour correction or any capability to crop. Indeed, other than a few layout options allowing up to eight images per sheet, borderless printing and choosing the date or quantity of prints, there are no editing or image enhancement features on the menu. Depending on the model, when connecting a Canon compact or PictBridge compatible camera certain in-camera features and effects may or may not be available. As well as a side-mounted USB port, an extendable USB cable is located at the front, but it's only 25cm in length.

Like the other Selphy models, the CP710 is supplied with driver software and Canon's excellent ImageBrowser utility for printing from a Mac. It lacks both Bluetooth and IrDA (infra-red) for printing from multimedia phones or a MacBook and the like, but that's hardly surprising given the price. That said, Bluetooth is supported via an optionally available dongle. Also useful, is the rechargeable battery option at £49.

Regardless of the source, print times didn't vary a great deal, providing Jpegs were roughly of similar size. Printing directly from our test camera, an 8-megapixel HP Photosmart R927 and a SanDisk Ultra II SD card from a 5-megapixel Panasonic Lumix TZ1, averaged 80 seconds for a 6x4in print. And it was much the same printing from a PowerBook G4 via USB2, though substantially larger files, such as our 16MB sRGB Tiff test image, added 15 seconds. Print quality was very high using the driver. But although images were digested quickly from the SD card, snaps had poor saturation and looked washed-out.

Ultimately, the Selphy failed to impress; while printing from a PictBridge camera and a Mac was successful, unless you're prepared to adjust saturation in-camera for printing from memory cards, we simply can't recommend the CP710 without reservation.