Photograph: Marc Simon
You don't need to edit and print your photos on a PC: Sony's new DPP-FP50 Digital Photo Printer lets you do the work on a TV. The $200 dye-sublimation snapshot printer also permits you to print your images directly from a memory card or from a PictBridge-compatible digital camera.
The compact DPP-FP50's small, monochrome LCD lets you select the images to print, but it doesn't allow you to preview them. I found the printer much easier to use when I plugged the supplied cable into my living-room TV set. Using the included remote, I could browse stored images and edit them on screen.
I saw plenty of sharp detail in test output from the DPP-FP50, but some prints lacked contrast and vivid colors.
The DPP-FP50 prints borderless snapshots on sheets of 4-by-6-inch or 3.5-by-5-inch paper. It comes with a starter pack containing 20 sheets and a print ribbon. You can buy a paper-and-ribbon refill pack to print 80 4-by-6 photos for $45. The per-print cost of the refill pack is 56 cents--almost double the amount you would pay with the Epson PictureMate, which had the lowest per-print cost of the four snapshot printers we tested for our April review, "Photo Printers: The Price of Great Pictures."
The DPP-FP50 is perfect for your family to gather around the TV and view slide shows of their latest adventures, printing their favorites with a few clicks of the remote. But for better picture quality at an economical price, I recommend the Epson PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition. That model costs $50 more, but cheaper printing costs will make up the difference after about 150 snaps.
If you don't want to sit at a PC to edit and print your photos, the DPP-FP50 is appealing; but prints don't come cheap.
Price when reviewed: $200
Current prices (if available)
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