Pros & Cons
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- Print pack holds both dye roll and paper for easy setup and better portability.
- Photos are water and scratch resistant.
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- Relatively big and heavy for a small-format printer.
- Diagonal lines (like spokes in a wheel) can print with jagged edges.
Canon Selphy ES40 Specs
| Claimed lifetime for photos - dark storage: | 110 years |
| Claimed lifetime for photos - exposed: | 10 years |
| Claimed lifetime for photos - framed behind glass: | 30 years |
| Color or Monochrome: | 4-pass color |
| Connection Type: | USB |
| Cost Per Page (Color): | 32 cents |
| Cost Per Page (Mono): | 32 cents |
| Direct Printing from Cameras: | Yes (via cable) |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | CompactFlash Type I |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | CompactFlash Type II |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick Duo |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick Pro |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Memory Stick Pro Duo |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | Microdrive |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | MiniSD Card |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | MultiMedia Card |
| Direct Printing from Media Slots: | xD-Picture Card |
| Ink Jet Type: | Dedicated Photo |
| Input Capacity (printer input only): | 50 sheets |
| LCD Preview Screen: | Yes |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size: | 4" x 6" |
| Network-Ready: | No |
| Number of Cartridges: | 1 |
| Number of Ink Colors: | 3 |
| Photos - HIGH -QUALITY SETTINGS - Adobe Photoshop 7 - Average output time per print: 4" x 6" prints : | 1:17 (min:sec) |
| Print Duplexing: | No |
| Printer Category: | Thermal Dye |
| Tech Support: | www.canontechsupport.com; (800) 652-2666; 1-year overnight exchange |
| Type: | Printer Only |
| Water/smudge proof or resistant: | Yes |
In most cases, if you hear a voice coming from your printer, you should be worried that you're having a psychotic episode. But with the Canon Selphy ES40 dedicated photo printer ($149.99 direct), the talking is normal.
The printer doesn't speak up all that often. For most of my testing, it stayed silent, finding its voice only when printing from memory cards, and, even then, only to announce that the print job was finished (well...duh!). It turned out to be more ... uh ... outspoken when I explored the Creative menus, where it guided me through selecting frames, clipart, and the like stored in the printer—but it still didn't tell me anything I couldn't figure out by looking at its LCD screen.
Although giving the ES40 a voice is ultimately more of a novelty than a particularly useful feature, the spoken words will guide you through the Creative menus, and for some people, it may add to the fun factor. Curmudgeons who find it more of a gimmick than a help can turn the voice off, in which case they'll still have a highly capable, small-format (4- by 6-inch) dedicated photo printer on their hands.
Size and Setup
The ES40 is similar in many ways to the
Relatively big and heavy for a thermal dye-based photo printer, at 8.9 by 8.9 by 5.4 inches (HWD) and 4.8 pounds, the ES40 is in the same size and weight class as its inkjet-based competition, including, for example, the similarly priced Editors' Choice
The large size is dictated by the combined ink and paper cartridge. Because of the way the paper sits in the cartridge, the printer has to rotate each sheet 90 degrees to print. It needs the extra room both to rotate the paper and to fit the mechanism that does the rotation.
One advantage of the single cartridge is that it makes setup a little easier than with traditional thermal dye printers, with only one thing to load. Another is that it enhances the printer's portability, since you don't have to carry paper and a paper tray separately. Even better, if you need to bring additional supplies, you need only one package for both ink and paper, with a single cartridge able to print as many as 50 photos.
Largely thanks to the cartridge design, setting up the ES40 is as easy as it gets: slide a print pack into the side of the printer, connect a power cord (there's no battery option), and you're ready to print from PictBridge cameras or memory cards. Note that you can't print from a USB memory key, but if you get the Bluetooth Adapter ($49.99 direct), you can print from a camera phone or other Bluetooth device.
If you also want to print from a computer, simply connect a USB cable and run the installation program from the supplied disc. For my computer-based tests, I installed the driver on a system running Windows Vista, but according to Canon, the printer also comes with drivers for Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X v.10.4 to 10.5.x. Canon also says that a Windows 7 driver will be available on its Web site the same day the new OS officially launches.—
Output Quality and Speed
Even the worst-looking output from the ES40 in my tests easily qualified as true photo quality, with one glaring exception—a problem I've seen over and over again with Canon photo printers for years.
For some images printed from a computer—and only from a computer—thin diagonal lines, like the spokes at some angles in a bicycle wheel, print with obviously jagged edges. As I've pointed out in other Canon photo printer reviews, this appears to be a problem in Canon's driver, since the identical files printed from a memory card don't run into the same problem.
This isn't a major issue mostly because very few images have diagonal lines that cause the problem, and also because if you run into it, you can move the file to a memory card to print. However, it's an annoying flaw, and it would be nice if Canon would finally invest the time to fix it.
Aside from this perennial issue, the photo quality is generally better than anything you would expect from your local drugstore. However, I noticed an obvious difference between photos printed from a Canon PowerShot S60 camera over a PictBridge connection and the same photos printed from the same memory card plugged into the printer itself.
Photos printed over the PictBridge connection were consistently darker and tended to lose details based on shading in dark areas. For those that weren't dark enough to lose detail, dark colors tended to look a little muddy. This difference may or may not hold true for all cameras and memory cards, but if you get the printer, you'll certainly want to try printing both ways to see if one choice gives you better quality than the other.
In any case, the photos should last a reasonably long time. Canon claims a lifetime of 100 years in dark storage (as in an album), 30 years framed behind glass, or 10 years exposed to air. They're also relatively rugged. They proved to be highly water resistant and scratch resistant in my tests, which translates to it being safe to hand out a stack of photos to a group of people to shuffle though without the risk of ruining them.
The ES40's print speed was essentially identical to the ES3's speed in my tests, which makes it noticeably slower than the best available, but well within an acceptable range. I timed it at a consistent 1 minute 17 seconds per photo (plus or minus 1 second), whether printing from a computer, from the Canon PowerShot S60 camera, or from a CompactFlash card. As a point of reference, the Epson PictureMate Dash turned in times ranging from 40 to 49 seconds.
Running Costs and Print Packs
Canon offers a choice of print packs. The most economical is the 100-photo pack (with two 50-photo cartridges) for $31.99 (direct), which works out to 32 cents per photo. This is a little steep compared with the PictureMate's cost of 25.3 cents per photo (based on $37.99 for a 150-photo print pack). This 6.7-cent difference per photo adds up to a substantial $67 for 1,000 photos—a number you can easily reach over the lifetime of the printer. Note too that this is the same print pack that Canon was selling for $28 when I reviewed the ES3, so the price has gone up in the past and could go up again.
Canon also offers an interesting extra, with special print packs that add either a gold or silver panel to the dye roll in addition to the four standard panels of cyan, yellow, magenta, and a protective coating. Print a photo with either of these packs, at about $1 per photo, and you can add a gold or silver frame to the photo itself.
The printer also comes with a one-year parts-and-labor warranty that includes what Canon calls InstantExchange. During the warranty period, if Canon's support staff can't fix a problem over the phone, Canon will ship you a replacement along with a prepaid return shipping label for the non-working printer. Canon picks up the shipping cost in both directions.
The one real drawback for the ES40 is the relatively high cost per photo. If running costs matter, you're much better off with the Epson PictureMate Dash. If you ignore the running cost, however, or operate on a cost-is-no-object budget, the ES40 is otherwise an attractive choice with high-quality output and acceptably fast speed.
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