CanonSELPHY CP900 Wireless Color Photo Printer

We can't get this printer in the UK yet so I had to purchase from the US but apart from a brief stay in customs it all arrived fine. The single reason for purchasing the printer is that it can print directly from an iPad over WiFi without needing the need for a router and it does that just great and I'm very happy with the print quality. There are a couple of points to be aware, it uses coloured film to produce the photo and it does it a layer at a time printing CMYK so the paper is passed back and forth through the printer 4 times laying down each colour. This means it is a little slow printing but the resulting photo is totally dry and ready to handle as soon as it is finished and the film cartridges are easy to handle and as the printer is portable means there will be no spills and leaks as it gets thrown around. The cartridges do have a fixed number of prints they can produce and the one that comes with the printer is only capable of 5 so make sure you order more cartridges and paper as once a cartridge has produced its set number of prints its useless, you can't squeeze another print out, you can't refill them. As the cartridges are basically a spool of coloured film its also important to understand that printing a little colour of pic of something is going to use up one print, the same as printing a full borderless image so there is no point in trying to be efficient and conserve 'ink'. However buying more cartridges and paper isn't too expensive and you can get kits that bundle them together but it does means being reliant on Canon as no one else can produce 'refills. Another thing to point out is that if you want truly portable printing and go for a battery option you also need a charger and the two of them together cost more than the printer itself and they set external to the printer and plug into the power port on the printer so the printer is never free of wires. This is a real shame and its unfortunate that Canon couldn't find a way of making the battery clip on to the printer itself but I guess one positive is that as the battery is pretty large, much larger than anything for a camera or camcorder it should last a long time in between charges. In summary I am really happy with the printer and everyone I have shown it to agrees and if you need photo printing on the move with an iPad, iPhone etc its really the only option I have found that does it this well, yes its a pain the battery is external and you yes you need special consumables but all in all I have no regrets purchasing it. Oh and one last thing, I wanted to take full size screen prints from the iPad (pushing the Home and Sleep button together) and print them out but if you do that you can only print with a border and not borderless as it cuts off the edges of the image so if you find prints losing part of the image switch borderless printing off. This is done within the Canon app for the iPad/iPhone which you need to download to use with the printer, you can't print natively from the iPad direct to the printer in the way AirPrint works you do need the free Canon app.

I love this little printer.To start off, It's pretty small. Folded up, the printer unit is a little bigger than a 4x6 photo. Good for people on the go. I personally would have been okay with a larger printer if it meant better quality, but the quality is pretty good.It prints images 4x6 and down.It has some wifi mode which I can't get connected to my mac for some reason. So I hook it up to USB.Now, to the print quality. It is very good. Very good. Looks as good as the photos that you'd get back from drugstores during the film days.Now, one thing about photography as it has moved digital is that in the transition it became less impactful. Most screen resolutions are like 1360x768 which doesn't come close to doing justice to a 10-20 megapixel image. Even the retina ipad only has a 4 megapixel screen.Most printers do not do a good job of printing photos. I've never been happy with the results from inkjet or laser printers. Oftentimes the paper itself is soggy. I can easily spot imperfections caused by the printer where there was none in the original.Dye-sub does a very good job at rendering photographs.When I look at the photo, it looks as good as it does on screen. There are no little pixelations from inkjet dots.This is partially a function of the small size, but all the same, it looks pretty good. One slight flaw I noticed is that sometimes you will see a small blotch of imperfection on the print, like a red dot or a white dot. It doesn't distract but it is there if you look for it.The process of printing is very neat to watch. You see the printer pick up the paper and then print the yellow layer. Then it brings the paper back through and it prints the red layer. Then again and it prints the blue layer. This by the way is why this process is better than inkjets. Because the layers overlap each other, which allows for very fine detail.And there is something about being able to hold a photo in your hands that makes it more tangible and impactful, while just viewing on the screen is transitory. You end up appreciating small parts of the photo which you might not have while staring at a computer screen. Since I"m something of a creative person, I hope to use printed photos from this machine as a touchstone anchor and inspiration while I work on creative projects.Every photographer should own this printer. Every photographer. Spend slightly less on your DSLR if that's what it takes to own this printer. It really makes enjoying the fruits of the hobby much better.