First Look: Canon Selphy CP760

 

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Posted on 16 May 2008 at 17:59

Canon's Selphy CP760 is cheap and cheerful compact photo printer. It's set to have a retail price of just over £70 when released later this month. Like the rest of Canon's Selphy range of compact printers, the CP760 uses dye-sublimation to create beautifully smooth images. Dye-sub printers use heat to turn transparent sheets of solid ink into a gas that adheres to the photo paper. This avoids the graininess that can affect inkjet photo prints.

Print quality compares well to Sony's DPP-FP and Kodak's EasyShare dye-sub printers. Our first few test prints were smooth and vividly coloured. Skin tones looked natural and we loved the intensity of our clear blue sky. If anything, the CP760's colour reproduction may be a little too vibrant, although the use of composite black renders dark tones rather pale.

You can print photos from a PC, digital camera with PictBridge support, or from various popular memory card formats, although you'll need a special adaptor to print from the xD format used by Olympus and Fuji cameras.

A 2.5in screen lets you preview your photos, but there aren't many menu options. You're limited to red-eye removal and a few preset colour adjustments, but this simplicity makes it very easy to use. It took just over a minute to print a 6x4in photo directly from an SD card. You can also buy a Bluetooth adaptor to print from camera phones, but we were disappointed to find that there will be no battery pack available.

At well under £100, this could be just the ticket when it comes to instantly printing your holiday snaps this summer. Ink and paper are sold in multi-packs, but it's worth remembering that even the best deal is unlikely to give you print costs much below 20p per photo. You can read our full review of the CP760 in Shopper 246.

Author: Kat Orphanides