Labs

Canon's Selphy ES2 is the most expensive dye-sub printer here. Paper and ink are cleverly contained in a single cartridge, with both tri-colour and black and white versions available.

Despite this seemingly simple configuration, the paper takes a meandering path in and out of the printer as it's first pulled out of the cartridge in landscape orientation, then flipped into portrait mode at the front of the printer before making its way in and out of the machine over the course of the four-pass printing process. The route taken by the paper isn't the only complex element to this printer. A surprisingly large number of buttons surround the

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3in LCD screen. These control a fairly typical range of editing and creative options, which would have made more sense in a conventional menu system.

Some of the more effective features include a scroll wheel, which can be used to resize the selected area when cropping photos, and a few picture effects we haven't seen elsewhere, such as faded edges and a starburst filter, while an optional battery pack adds portability. The PC driver, while simple, includes image adjustment and colour-balancing effects that will be familiar if you've used Canon's full-sized inkjets, although it's not possible to save colour profiles.

The ES2 printed six photos in eight minutes, which compares well with the other printers here. Unfortunately, this quirky printer failed to impress when it came to quality. Our photos looked acceptable in isolation, but didn't compare well to pictures produced by other printers in the group. Typically for a dye-sub printer, small, complex details were reproduced with great accuracy, but we were surprised by the poor rendition of shading, while dark and low-contrast images looked flat and dull. This counts against the ES2, along with its lack of support for xD cards, complicated interface and high price.