Canon Selphy CP770

08 January 2010

A paying job is always a good time to shop for new gear, right, so I picked up a Canon Selphy CP770 dye sub photo printer for a birthday party photo booth project.

Amazon/Adorama had the best price by far, plus it's a generation or two old, so I ordered one weeks before the job. It arrived quickly, but I couldn't get the screen to light at all. After some slow communication with Adorama (holiday rush, I guess), I made arrangements to return the first one and ordered a replacement printer right away.

This one worked wonderfully on its most basic settings. The option to "Show Info" with the photos caused the printer screen to show a question mark instead of the image, so I disabled that. The "Image Optimization" option also did a surprisingly good job of normalizing my images, which is good for general use. In the end, though, it removed the moody shadows and contrasts that I intentionally included in my test shots, so I disabled pretty much every option and ran it in its most basic mode. I like control.

The dye sub cartridges and photo paper packages are pretty convenient, and the color reproduction came out as I expected. New supply packs include 4x6 photo paper and dye sub cartridges. A pack for 108 prints seems to be about $30.

I'm expecting that these dye sub packs don't "dry out" or anything like that, so I'm hoping this printer will be worth having, unlike any inkjet printer I've had in the past.

Once it's all assembled and powered on, I just copy the processed photos from the computer onto an SD card, pop it into the printer's built-in card reader, and tell it to "Print All Images", or pick them individually.

Claire finds it easy to use, and Paige already has her eye on this thing. I'm sure she'll be using it soon.

Filed Under: Photography