Product Reviews

Some compact photo printers are inkjets but others, such as Canon's Selphy ES1, use dye sublimation. A dye-sub printer prints by moving paper across a stationary print head, so you need to leave plenty of space clear behind it. The ES1 is the first dye-sub we've reviewed that's arranged vertically, so it needs far less space on the desk.

You normally buy ink and paper for a dye-sub in a bundle that prints a fixed number of photos, but the ES1 takes a single consumable containing both paper and an ink ribbon. Two sizes are available: the 50-print pack costs £11, and a 100-print pack is available for £19. Using the 100-print pack, print costs are competitive at 19p per print.

It's easy to open up the large side door and slot either pack into the printer, and unlike other Canon dye-subs you can't get the paper the wrong way round. Strangely, paper within the consumable is aligned across the printer, and needs to be turned through 90 before the ES1 can print on it. Each page performs an elaborate pirouette at the front of the printer before disappearing inside to be printed. The

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process adds almost 30 seconds to each print and seems to require a lot of servo motors. We didn't experience any feed problems during our tests, though.

Printing from the PC is straightforward, with a driver interface that's easy to understand. You can print directly from a camera memory card, too, but you'll need an adaptor for the xD format. The ES1's large screen is sharp and brightly lit, but the menu system takes a while to understand. The default one-shot-at-a-time print mode is less easy to use than selecting multiple images and printing them in a batch. The screen shows a single large shot, but we preferred selecting images from the thumbnail display.

The ES1 has a captive USB cable on a reel, which extends and retracts like a vacuum cleaner lead. It's suitable for connecting a digital camera, but the ES1 also has a standard PictBridge port for cameras without a Mini-B type USB connector.

Though the ES1 is cheap to run for a dye-sub, it isn't especially quick. Printing six shots from a PC took eight minutes and 24 seconds, while from a memory card it took seven minutes and 36 seconds. We weren't greatly impressed with either set of results. Colours were faithful to the original pictures, but the ES1 struggled to reproduce subtle progressions of shade. This was most evident in pictures of sky, which looked slightly mottled and artificial in places.

We were disappointed that the ES1's unusual paper loading mechanism didn't prevent dust getting on to the page and causing the occasional colour blemish, a typical print flaw in dye-sub printers. It's an attractive printer, but it seems complicated, produces lacklustre results and is expensive to buy.