Canon Selphy CP780
Lab quality photo prints at a price
Review The Selphy CP780 is a tiny personal photo printer for producing lab-quality 6 x 4in prints. At just 176 x 132 x 75mm it can sit unobtrusively on a shelf or at the back of a drawer, ready to be brought out quickly for those occasions when you want an ad-hoc hardcopy of a photo you have taken with your digital camera.
Canon's Selphy CP780
Canon has resisted the urge to make the device cute at the expense of functionality, so it remains relatively plain, compact and rectangular. We tested the silver version; the white version would have been plainer still. If you want cuteness, buy the pink or blue versions.
Unfortunately, the impression of compact tidiness is destroyed when you plug in the power cable at the back and a USB cable at the side, leaving cables trailing in two directions across the table. Putting the two inputs together would have made the device appear classier.
A plastic paper cassette slots into the front of the unit, with a hinged flap on top acting as the output tray. The cassette is designed to hold any of a range of Canon-branded media including 6 x 4in photo cards, 100 x 200mm wide-format photo cards, and various sizes of stickers.
Embarrassingly enough, we spent several minutes trying to work out how to assemble the paper cassette parts, which were packaged separately, and it took some thought before we realised how the cassette was supposed to fit into the printer.
The optional Bluetooth adapter, shown here, is unnecessarily expensive at £40.
Canon might think the Selphy CP780 is perfectly intuitive but we think a little ‘getting started’ sheet would have been helpful here. There are little setup diagrams on one of the parts (the cassette lid, as it turns out) but they don’t make any sense until you have already put everything together. Yes, yes, it seems obvious *now*, but it didn’t at the time.
COMMENTS
Erm, no thanks.
For the rare occasions I need a physical print, I'll stick with my Samsung SP-2020 which I picked up for £14 a couple of years ago and produces perfectly acceptable prints, the match of most of the kiosk printout things. With a 120 pack of paper/ribbon only costing £20, it provides prints at less than 20p each which is a fair premium over online/Costco etc. for the convenience of having a print in under 2 minutes, including getting the thing out of a drawer and hooking it up.
Can't imagine why anyone would pay 3 times this much for what is still a very small print. If colour accuracy etc. is important to you the you're unlikely to be satisfied with a 6x4" print from your EOS 5D shots.
re: Frank Bough
35mm film, and subsequently DSLR cameras have always been 3:2 aspect ratio. Most consumer P&S cameras also let you adjust the aspect ratio, with 3:2, 4:3 and 16:9 being popular.
...or not...
Amazon in the USA have this thing for $90.76 right now. At todays exchange rate, that's £55.10. More than double what is is (£119.21) on Amazon UK for example. There's no way that the price difference should be so high - someone (Canon maybe) is profiteering on this one in the UK at least.
It's a shame - I love my Canon G10 camera, but I got a Sony photo printer to go with it - just as good, just as fast, but more reasonably priced, and better priced consumables.
Aspect Ratio
6x4 is a different shape to the image recorded by most digicams, which is 4x3.
Hope its improved!
I bought one of the original dye-sub Selphys about 3 years ago to go with my 350D. It was terrible. The pictures all had a wonderful green tinge to them, even after correction in Photoshop etc. Plus the prints all had print streaks across them when held up to the light.
Not good. What was even more annoying was my Gf's grandfather was able to get far better results with his £60 Kodak printer/camera combo.
I paid full price for mine (it had only been available about a month) but returned it a day or so later. I also noticed that retailers dropped the price by around £90 a week or so later! Thats the mark of a quality product!
