Sony Picture Station DPP-FP55

Weighing only 2.4 pounds, the $150 (as of 11/3/2006) Sony DPP-FP55 is the lightest and smallest snapshot printer we've tested recently. It's reasonably priced, but it lacks some of the features and design elements of its pricier rivals. For one thing, its small color LCD measures just 2.0 inches, and its tiny text makes reading the menus and other prompts difficult. A four-way controller helps with navigation, but the four buttons for accessing the menu, zooming in and out, and canceling operations are incomprehensibly small and fiddly.

The FP55's two media slots accept only Sony Memory Stick cards (including its Pro and Duo variations) and SD or MultiMediaCard. If your camera uses a CompactFlash card or xD-Picture Card, you're out of luck. You can use the unit's USB port to print directly from thumb drives or PictBridge-enabled cameras.

Using on-printer editing, you can rotate and crop images, remove red-eye, and apply filter effects. There's no auto-fix function, but you can manually adjust the brightness, tint, saturation, and sharpness.

The FP55 generated 4-by-6-inch prints from our test SD Card at 0.9 pages per minute for both color and black-and-white images. As you'd expect with a dye-sublimation printer, tonal changes were nice and smooth; but compared with the other snapshot printers we've tested recently, the FP55 produced dull colors and hazy details. We also noticed a narrow white line running the length of several prints.

In two informal moisture tests, we looked for defects after sprinkling water on week-old (and therefore dry) snapshot prints. Then we dunked them in water for 30 seconds and wiped them dry. The edges of the FP55's prints swelled slightly after the dunking, but didn't otherwise show any obvious ill effects after either test.

In the box, you get an ink ribbon and enough paper for just 10 prints. Replacement bundles include ribbons and paper in packs of 40, 80, or 120 sheets. At $35, the 120-print package proves the most economical at a cost per print of 29 cents.

The FP55 uses paper with perforated tabs to help it feed accurately. You tear off the tabs at each end once you've printed your photo, leaving slightly rough perforated edges.

Paul Jasper