Sony DPP-FP30 Digital Photo Printer

Best All-Around Color Among Portable Dye-Sub Printers

Aside from Sony many other brands make portable dye-sublimation printers these days which makes the choice tougher. I did not consider purchasing the Dell HP Kodak or Olympus ones because they are simply too big - I wanted one that I can comfortably bring with me on my travels so I can print my own postcards to send home.



I tried out the Canon CP-400 (form factor even smaller than the Sony DPP-FP30) in the store and found that the print-outs (direct from my camera not touched up by computer) have a blue cast to them and in a side-by-side comparison the Sony print-outs (of the same pictures) have much prettier colors.



And comparing to Sony's own older model DPP-SV77 which I have at home: The DPP-SV77 is bigger complete with touchscreen LCD and Memory Stick/PC Card slots built-in creativety functions such as printing calendars and has a higher resolution of 403 dpi (the DPP-FP30 reviewed here like the Canon models only has 300 dpi). BUT the little DPP-FP30 actually prints photos with much truer color while the big brother DPP-SV77 tends to exagerate reds and greens and over-sharpen any edges. The lower resolution in the DPP-FP30 is not noticeable at all unless I print fine text to it from a computer which is not this printer's intended purpose anyway.



While I am very happy with the Sony DPP-FP30 I WISH IT COULD HAVE HAD (Sony are you listening):



- A battery option so it's not necessary to carry the AC adapter or to be tethered to a power source when printing.



- A button to toggle between bordered (no cropping) and borderless (cropped).



- More creativety functions in the included software.



- Without increasing the overall size by too much add multi-type card reader slots and a small color LCD to choose pictures (better yet ability to trim/crop them before printing). This would also eliminate the requirement that the digital camera must be PicBridge compatible.



The other obvious shortcomings common to all portable dye-sub printers are that 1) paper/cartridge are prioritery and on the expensive side and 2) print size is limited to a maximum of 4x6 (4x8 in some cases). These I accept for now because I want the quality and durability of dye-sub prints (as opposed to inkjet prints). Hopefully these will improve with time.



As no other printer today has everything I hope for (see above) I am still giving the Sony DPP-FP30 5 stars for its excellent quality prints.More detail ...