Samsung SPP-2040 review

Gallery

Verdict:

The SPP-2040 may be one of the oldest printers here, but itfs still a fantastic printer. If you want the best prints from a memory card, this printerfs worth the extra.

Review Date: 14 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: inc. VAT

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Samsung's SPP-2040 looks as good today as it did when we first reviewed it, back in November 2005 when it cost £150.

It's a particularly stylish mix of black and silver, with a great little flip-up display. This is a particularly easy printer to set up, with a simple install program and little physical preparation before you're ready to start printing.

Though the display is small, it's sharp and bright, and the menu system is easy to understand. There aren't any editing options such as red-eye or crop, but the SPP-2040 makes up for this with outstanding print quality. Shots printed directly from an SD memory card are as good as any we've seen.

Images were very sharp, with well-judged levels of brightness and contrast suited to a wide range of subjects. Smooth colour gradients were almost perfect, with no blemishes. It's a similar story when printing from a PC, but the colours are just a little flat, robbing some shots of their impact. We narrowly prefer the extra pizazz of the PictureMate 240fs PC prints, but the SPP-2040 is better when printing from cards.

Dye-sub printers are generally more expensive to run than inkjets, and the SPP-2040 is no exception. After you've used up the 10-print starter pack, you can buy further supplies in bundles of 40 or 120 prints. We found the 120-print pack for under £23 on www.dabs.com, giving a cost per print of around 19p. Although not unreasonable, most of the printers here are cheaper to run and only Canon's Selphy ES1 is more expensive to buy.

Even so, the Samsung's prints from a memory card are the only ones here that truly match a professional lab. In this case, it's worth paying a little extra if you want the best results.

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