Canon Selphy 510 DyeSub Printer

Nutshell Summary: No-frills DyeSub printer capable of superb quality right from the camera. Postcards printed from the Selphy 510 from my Nikon D3x look sharp and colorful, at least as good as minilab prints. Portability is possible but cumbersome.

The Selphy 510 was one of the first, miniature Canon DyeSub models to reach the market. It is totally frill-free as it has no built-in card reader, screen or Bluetooth. The only control is an on-off button! However, the print-engine supplies are the same as those of several follow-on Canon models, and therefore widely available. The old Selphy 510, if you find one on sale, is as good as a new model if you don't need the newer feature-set.

Loading supplies is a bit fussy as this dyesub printer needs a spool of color foil ribbon and a supply of paper cards to be loaded before it prints. The paper needs to be carfully placed in an external tray. Printing is a simple as pulling out the retractable USB mini-plug, and connecting it to the camera. PC and USB drivers are also available.

When printing from my Nikon D3x cropping was possible, and borders could be requested. Borderless is really edge to edge. Postcard size prints emerge from the printer after about one minute. The prints are colorful and stand up to fingers and other domestic abuse. As an experiment, I profiled the printer for use on the Mac, for a slight improvement over the default software settings.

My sample of this printer is two years old, and is getting hard to convince to switch on. I suspect a hardware fault. However I cannot complain about the printouts, which delight all my friends and convince strangers to pose for me.

Pros: Beautiful and tough postcard-sized printouts. Widely available and reasonably priced supplies. Cons: Protruding paper tray must be separately stowed. Heavy power brick. Expensive battery is optional and rarely stocked in brick and mortar store.
Verdict: A Useful Buy.

Polaroid PoGo Printer

Nutshell Review: Polaroid Zink Pogo is a tiny battery-powered printer that prints on even tinier 2x3 inch stickers. Print quality is haphazard, but it delivers on portability and on connectivity: Works with cameras and mobile phones.

Pogo is totally fussfree: All you need is add the special paper, (10 sheets are supplied), charge the battery, and you're ready to go. Polaroid PoGo (Print on the Go) is based on a new thermal printing process called Zink (Zero Ink). Crystals embedded in the paper change color as they are heated.

The PoGo can comes with a hefty charger brick, but the printing device itself is as small as a cigar case, flat and totally self contained. The build material is mostly metal, which is unusual these days, but may be mandated by the need to lead off excess heat. There are two ways to connect to PoGo, it seems. One is by means of Bluetooth (my device had password 6000 programmed into it) or a USB big to USB mini cable which you need to supply.

I connected PoGo to my Nikon D3x dSLR, and the printing system started up nicely as soon as the cable was plugged in. However, the printer supplies no crop or border options: It was print the whole frame borderless or nothing. Printing takes about a minute, I noticed it varied from image to image. Print quality was really haphazard , I got some good and some dreadful results. Most the images had strange colors and were oversharpened.

Polraoid's Zink Pogo is a user-friendly pocketable device that really can talk to your phone or camera; however, don't expect too much realism from the images. This gadget should be viewed as a party toy. It won't supply good detail, or color but it will deliver stickers and photo fun.

Pros: Easy to use pocket-sized printer. Cons: Tiny mediocre printouts.
Verdict: An overpriced toy.

Overview

Hi Folks! I'm a camera geek, and I've found that a small printer is a great asset to have with you, if you can. You've undoubtedly seen some of these small critters, and if you've come to this site you're thinking of buying one. I hope I can help you choose a model, and maybe give you some tips on the care and feeding of your purchase.

At this point, I intend to cover printing devices that are small enough to fit in a kit bag. There are some larger printers intended for professionals selling images at events, but I'm not going to write about these.

All the mobile printers sold at the moment are based on one of four print technologies: Inkjet, (mostly sold by HP and Epson), dye sublimation (mostly Canon and Sony) a new Polaroid-branded process called Zink, and a real chemical-based spinoff of the old Polaroid technology marketed in Japan by FujiFilm under the Pivi brand.