Reviewed: $100 Snapshot Printers

But are they good deals or just gadgets? In the case of our Best Buy, the Epson PictureMate Dash, you may be surprised at how much it has to offer: a 3.6-inch LCD, buttons for printing without a PC, and several fun editing features. The Dash may look like a glorified lunch box, complete with handle, but it delivers where it counts. It is faster than the other models we tested, and it prints good-looking photos. Best of all, its consumable costs are moderate, at 26 cents per print (based on the $40 PictureMate Print Pack, which supplies enough paper and ink to produce 150 4-by-6-inch prints).

HP's Photosmart A526 takes the opposite tack, minimizing features but maximizing print quality, making up somewhat for its slowness. This inkjet-based model is fairly compact and, like the Photosmart, sports a handle for toting. If you buy HP's $35 supply pack, which contains sufficient ink and paper for 120 4-by-6-inch prints, the cost per page is a tolerable 29 cents. The A526's 2.4-inch LCD is quite a bit smaller than the Dash's, however.

Two dye-sublimation printers rub shoulders with the inkjets in our rankings. Canon's Selphy CP740 and Sony's DPP-FP70 pair compact base units with somewhat awkward external paper cassettes. They use special paper and film-based ink that are matched precisely to one another, so you can't use third-party supplies; and if you want to change paper size, you have to change the cassette and cartridge, too.

Canon sells a kit containing 108 sheets of 4-by-6-inch paper plus a 108-print cassette for $30--a reasonable 27 cents per print. The postcard-paper cassette that comes with the printer is external; inserting it into the printer's front nearly doubles the machine's footprint. The CP740's LCD is even smaller than the HP A526's, at only 2 inches.

The Sony model offers better speed and print quality than the Selphy does, but it costs more. Like the Canon, the DPP-FP70 has a large paper cassette. The cost per print for both dye-subs is predictable because you use each section of ribbon only once. The Sony's print cost is a bit higher than average at 29 cents (if you buy the $35 pack of 120 sheets plus ink).

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• Most current Top Snapshot Printers chart
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Top Snapshot Printers From the December 2007 Issue of PC World Magazine

Click on the icon to view the chart from the December 2007 PC World.