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(More customer reviews)Aside from Sony, many other brands make portable dye-sublimation printers these days, which makes the choice tougher. I did not consider purchasing the Dell, HP, Kodak, or Olympus ones because they are simply too big - I wanted one that I can comfortably bring with me on my travels, so I can print my own postcards to send home.
I tried out the Canon CP-400 (form factor even smaller than the Sony DPP-FP30) in the store, and found that the print-outs (direct from my camera, not touched up by computer) have a blue cast to them, and in a side-by-side comparison the Sony print-outs (of the same pictures) have much prettier colors.
And comparing to Sony's own older model DPP-SV77, which I have at home: The DPP-SV77 is bigger, complete with touchscreen LCD and Memory Stick/PC Card slots, built-in creativety functions such as printing calendars, and has a higher resolution of 403 dpi (the DPP-FP30 reviewed here, like the Canon models, only has 300 dpi). BUT the little DPP-FP30 actually prints photos with much truer color, while the big brother DPP-SV77 tends to exagerate reds and greens, and over-sharpen any edges. The lower resolution in the DPP-FP30 is not noticeable at all unless I print fine text to it from a computer, which is not this printer's intended purpose anyway.
While I am very happy with the Sony DPP-FP30, I WISH IT COULD HAVE HAD (Sony, are you listening):
- A battery option, so it's not necessary to carry the AC adapter or to be tethered to a power source when printing.
- A button to toggle between bordered (no cropping) and borderless (cropped).
- More creativety functions in the included software.
- Without increasing the overall size by too much, add multi-type card reader slots and a small color LCD to choose pictures (better yet, ability to trim/crop them before printing). This would also eliminate the requirement that the digital camera must be PicBridge compatible.
The other obvious shortcomings common to all portable dye-sub printers are that 1) paper/cartridge are prioritery and on the expensive side, and 2) print size is limited to a maximum of 4x6 (4x8 in some cases). These I accept for now, because I want the quality and durability of dye-sub prints (as opposed to inkjet prints). Hopefully these will improve with time.
As no other printer today has everything I hope for (see above), I am still giving the Sony DPP-FP30 5 stars for its excellent quality prints.
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