Canon Selphy ES30: Expert Review and Customer Opinions

This is not a handbag

The Selphy ES30 appears to be like a hand-bag rather than a compact home photo printer. The Selphy ES30 has a handle to carry it around on the top of the device, making it fully portable. It´s design is so different compared to the other compact home photo printers in the market, that you might think it´s just too unreal to be able to produce to print some quality pictures. But you´ll be surprised.

Features And Technological Benefits

The Selphy ES30 belies its progressive appearance and is actually one of the best home photo printers on the market today. Like all the other Canon Selphy printers it´s a dye-sublimation printer, the technology of choice for photo printing.

A dye-sublimation printer produces true continuous tones appearing much like a chemical photograph. Whereas an inkjet print is composed of droplets of ink layered and scattered to simulate continuous tones, but under magnification the individual droplets can be seen.

Dye sublimation provides great advantages over inkjet printing. For one, the prints are dry and able to pick up directly after they leave the printer. For the reason that the thermal head does not have to move backwards and forwards over the paper, the printing process is using less hardware parts that may break down. Because the dye is not covered by the ink, the printing cycle is extraordinarily clean; there aren’t any liquid inks and no print heads to get clogged. These aspects make dye-sublimation the preferred technology over inkjet printing for photo printing.

So dye-sublimation process is less complicated, it creates a more homogeneous picture and additionally it has another big benefit that you don´t have to worry about the fading, cracking or peeling of the ink. A high quality, lasting picture is the favorable end result.

Canon sells ink and paper combine in one set. You open the slot and insert the ink-and-paper cartridge in a single go. So there´s no need for you to replace single color ink cartridges as is present is some inkjet printers. The good is that you don´t have to replace individual colors. The bad is that these cartridges are a bit on the expensive side. However, this disadvantage of these ´containing all colors´ cartridges is relative and the waste of non-used ink that is wasted is more obvious in all in one inkjet printers due to the nature of their printed documents.

The Canon ES30 home photo printer can include completely different image-effects and clip-art onto the photos and it offers the option to print a golden or silver border around your picture. Those the cartridges for these ink colors you´ll have to buy separately.

The small three-inch LCD display is joined by a couple of buttons that allow you to easily print from your memory car without the need to hook up a PC. These memory slots are conveniently positioned near the top.

Print Quality

When it comes to print quality for this home photo printer, we are very impressed with the Selphy ES30. A number of prints did have a barely visable yellowish tinge to them. But generally the photos were more glossy and vivid compared to the other compact home photo printer we tested recently (the HP Photosmart A646), Furthermore, the blacks were deep, skin tones were accurate and lifelike, all points in the Selphy’s favour.
It is not the quickest compact home photo printer. It takes slightly over a minute to finish a full print due to the 4 passes of a dye sublimation printer. However, for home photo printing, speed is not a crucial factor.

Cost per print

Though we generally liked the Selphy’s portability and print quality, the cost per print is still $0.30 cents, which is comparable to the other Selphy printers, and slightly cheaper than the review HP model. The cost can be considerably reduced if you can come across an offer for the cartridge and paper, though the price will generally still be a bit more expensive than shop prints. A small price we think for the portability and convenience.

Tagged with: Canon • Photo • Printer • printers • Printing • SELPHY

Filed under: canon photo printer

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