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With digital cameras getting better and cheaper, people are naturally using them to record more of their memories. But while digital photos have their advantages, until recently you couldn't readily give a friend or relative a print to stick into the family album. Instead, you had to download the photos to your PC and then either use an online printing service or print them with an ink jet printer, all of which took time.

Today you have another option: You can use one of the new breed of portable "snapshot" printers that produce prints quickly and simply. Most of them can read directly from the SmartMedia or CompactFlash memory cards that your digital cameras use, so you don't need a PC. And some can even crop and enhance pictures without a PC. But they do have limitations: None of the printers we tested can produce normal prints larger than 4 by 6 inches (although two can do panoramic shots), and we also discovered that image quality sometimes fell short of what you could expect to get from a good ink jet printer. Nonetheless, these printers provide a quick and easy way to make prints of digital photos.

We looked at four small snapshot printers from Acer, Canon, Polaroid, and Sony; the units' prices range from $99 to $449. The quality of their prints varies nearly as widely as their prices, and there is no correlation between the two. The $299 and $249 printers produced the most- and least-pleasing prints, respectively. Three of the four printers use dye-sublimation, a process that produces high-quality prints that should be more durable and better looking than the output most ink jets deliver. The fourth printer, from Polaroid, uses that company's Type 500 instant film pack.

To test each device, we printed digital photographs of a range of subjects and asked our panel to rate the quality of each print. For comparison, we also printed our test photos on a high-end ink jet unit, HP's $499 PhotoSmart 1218--one of the few ink jets that have ports for CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards, and one of the best we've tested for printing photos.

In many cases, we thought the PhotoSmart 1218 printed better-looking photos than our four snapshot printers; its colors especially were sometimes richer and more vivid. Still, ink jets continue to have problems with fading prints (see " Lost in the Ozone: Epson Photos Fade"). Independent research by Wilhelm Research has shown that while prints from every type of printer fade eventually, dye-sublimation prints remain vivid much longer than prints from ink jet printers. Plus, the printers we looked at cost less than the PhotoSmart.

Of the portable printers we review here, Sony's DPP-SV55 provides the best combination of print quality and low price, and it earns our Best Buy award. Though the Canon Digital Printer CD-300 produced prints that were very nearly as good, it costs $449--$150 more than the Sony and nearly as much as a good desktop photo printer.

How It Works

The printing process that dye-sublimation printers use differs from that of ink jets: Instead of spraying jets of ink onto a page as ink jet printers do, dye-sublimation printers apply a dye from a dry ribbon. Heat diffuses the dye onto specially treated paper. These printers use a three-pass system, layering cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes on top of one another; they then add a clear coat to protect the print against ultraviolet light. Done properly, this technique creates a smooth picture free of the dithering you see on ink jet prints (see " Dyes Don't Dither").

Dye-sublimation has one major shortcoming--production cost. Prints from the models we tested were between 80 and 90 cents each, compared with about 30 cents per print to develop standard film. But because you're printing digital shots, you can choose only the photos you want. Printers based on dye-sublimation technology are also expensive to manufacture, and the cost increases as the printing area gets bigger. All the dye-sublimation printers we reviewed are limited to 4-by-6-inch or smaller prints. If you move up to a dye-sublimation printer that can produce an 8 by 10, the price rises to the vicinity of $1000. But full-size units deliver stunning results, to judge from prints we created with Olympus's Camedia P-400 (see " No-Squint Printers").

DPOF Demystified

All the printers examined in this roundup--except the Acer--can print directly from digital camera memory cards and support Digital Print Order Format, which lets you select the pictures you want to print, quickly and directly. With DPOF, you preview the images and mark those you want to print before taking the media out of the camera. Then you put the memory card in the printer, and it picks the tagged shots and turns them into prints. Some small dye-sublimation printers let you use a TV screen to view and select shots to print. But if a TV set is not at hand and you're bypassing the computer, DPOF is the one remaining workable solution. The only other alternatives are impractical: to print everything in your camera or to try and remember which photos are which by number.

Lisa Cekan is a staff editor at PC World who regularly covers printers.

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