The Kodak Photo Printer Mini ($99.99) is one of a handful of tiny printers designed to let you print small photos from your phone or tablet. Although the Mini is the best we have seen of these subminiature photo printers, it falls short of the somewhat larger Editors' Choice Canon Selphy CP1200 in connectivity choices, running costs, and print quality. But if you can make do with wallet-size prints, and want only to print from your mobile device's photo albums or a social media account, the Mini represents the height of convenience.

Oh-So Portable

Matte-black with rounded corners, the Mini measures just 0.9 by 3 by 6 inches (HWD) and weighs a mere 8.4 ounces. (White and gold versions, otherwise identical, are also available.) It is slightly longer and heavier than the HP Sprocket Photo Printer ($119.99 at HP) (0.9 by 3 by 4.5 inches, 6 ounces), but it's still highly portable. (Its footprint is about the size of an iPhone 7 Plus, although it's more than twice as thick.) It has a built-in rechargeable battery, which takes 1.5 hours to charge over a micro-USB cable, according to Kodak.

Photos are printed from cartridges that combine ink and paper. Kodak sells them in 20-, 30-, and 50-print packs. Based on a list price of $34.83 for a 50-print pack, running costs are a relatively pricey 70 cents per wallet-size (2.1-by-3.4 inch) print. This is higher than both the HP Sprocket and the Polaroid Zip Photoprinter ($89.91 at Amazon) , which each have a cost of 50 cents per wallet-size print. That cost is also considerably higher than the Canon Selphy CP1200, whose small prints come to just 26 cents each; even its 4-by-6 prints only average 33 cents.

Connect, Edit, and Print

Once the Mini is charged, you briefly press the power button on the printer's side to turn it on. You then connect the printer to your device via a Wi-Fi network labeled "DIRECT-Kodak-". (The first time you access this network—the Mini acts as its own Wi-Fi hotspot—you will enter a password, which is "12345678" by default.) The printer is then conrolled using the Kodak Printer Mini app. I tested the Mini on iOS devices—an iPhone 7 Plus and an iPad Pro—but it can also be used with Android smart phones and tablets. It can also be connected via near field communication (NFC) to compatible Android devices.

When you have paired your mobile device to the printer, you can access photos from your camera roll, or from an Instagram or Snapseed folder. From the app's Connect button, you can also access photos directly from your Facebook, Instagram, or Google Photos feeds. Once you open a photo, you can resize it, apply editing tools (brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpening), add a frame, and add decorations such as stickers or text. Then you're good to print, although if you take more than 5 minutes to touch up your photo, the printer will turn off, and you will have to restart it and pair your mobile device again.

Quality for the Fridge

D2T2 isn't the name of a Star Wars droid; it's short for dye diffusion thermal transfer, the printing technique employed by the Mini; it is more commonly known as thermal dye or thermal transfer. Like other such printers, the Mini prints in four passes, meaning that it prints a layer, pulls the print back in, prints another layer, and so on. In the Mini's case, the layers are yellow, magenta, cyan, and a clear, protective coat. I timed the Mini at an average of 1 minute 19 seconds per 2-by-3-inch print. This is considerably slower than the Canon Selphy CP1200, another four-pass color printer, which averaged 59 seconds per 4-by-6 print. Zink—short for zero ink—printers, which print color photos using dye crystals embedded in their paper, need only a single pass to print a photo. Two Zink-based printers, the HP Sprocket and the Polaroid Zip, both averaged 42 seconds per 2-by-3 print.

In our testing, the Mini's overall print quality proved to be fair, good enough for prints destined for the refrigerator or to be handed out to friends. Unlike the HP Sprocket and the Polaroid Zip, whose colors were often muted, the Mini's prints tended to be on the light side, at times overly so, with detail washed out in some bright areas. A few backgrounds showed traces of banding, a regular pattern of faint striations. Quality was short of what we saw with the Canon CP1200.

See How We Test Printers

Do You Need Pocket-Size Printing?

The Kodak Photo Printer Mini is akin to the HP Sprocket and the Polaroid Zip in that it is a tiny printer that can print wallet-size photos from iOS or Android devices. Although the Mini's print quality is somewhat better than the Zink-based HP Sprocket and Polaroid Zip, it falls short of the Editors' Choice Canon Selphy CP1200, which can print photos up to 4-by-6 at a considerably faster speed and lower cost than the Mini. The Mini is far more portable than the CP1200, though, and you can easily slip it into a bag or even a coat pocket.

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