Product Reviews

We last reviewed a Hi-Touch photo printer in Labs, Shopper June 2004. Since then the company has been steadily adding to its range. Released in October 2004, the 641PS uses the same dye-sublimation engine as the 640PS, which has dropped to £200 including VAT.

When compared with the 640PS, the 641PS has a second USB port that gives it enhanced direct printing capabilities. It supports PictBridge digital cameras, but the printer can also be placed into a 'host' mode, where it emulates a PC's USB port.

Hi-Touch calls this system LinkPrint, and it allows access to images on a camera or USB storage device via the printer's direct printing menu. It provides more print options and control than using a camera's PictBridge functions, although the option to set the host is a little fiddly to select.

Dye-sublimation printers work by creating dye vapour, rather than an inkjet's small but visible

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droplets. Each colour - cyan, magenta and yellow -can typically be applied with any of 256 levels of intensity. Printed images are still formed of tiny blocks, but each block can be any one of nearly 17 million colours.

Although an inkjet can place individual ink drops with a higher resolution, typical inkjets use between three and nine colours for photo reproduction. They need to cover an area with many droplets to produce a block with the same potential colour range.

It's normally possible to make out slight stepping in the prints produced by affordable dye-sub devices due to their 300dpi resolution, but the 641PS prints at 403dpi, putting almost twice the information into the same area. Hi-Touch says this resolution is equivalent to an inkjet printing at 6,400dpi, and it seems a reasonable claim. Even under magnification there was no evidence of pixelation or other digital artefacts in our test prints.

Prints made from memory cards or via PictBridge had accurate colours but, despite several colour preference options in the driver, we struggled to find a setting that worked on all our test photographs. None of the settings seemed to be right for the grass and blue sky of our barn image.

£250 seems like a hefty sum for a 6x4" printer, particularly when it's made from garish silver plastic, but high print-quality sets the 641PS apart. Aside from some colour issues its prints are as good as a high-street lab but, at around 30p each, they aren't as cheap.