Samsung SPP-2040 Photo Printer

It would be hard to beat this deal: Fry’s, for a limited time, offered this printer for $49 after mail-in rebate.

It’s a dye-sublimation printer, which means that, when it comes to printing photographs, no inkjet comes even close: just like argentic photographs, no pixels are visible. That’s because, technically, there is no space between pixels.

Thus far, I am extremely pleased with the quality of the various prints I’ve made.

It is reasonably fast, about 1 minute/print, and the prints are dry as they come out of the printer. That’s one of these mundane things that it would be foolish to overlook.

Samsung promises that, because of the printing technique used, prints will not fade.

The printer comes with 10 sheets of photo paper and, of course, it doesn’t take more than an hour for the exalted wannabe photograph to go through all of them.

I was happy because I had bought 30 more sheets a few days earlier; I was busy patting myself in the back when I realized that dye sublimation really doesn’t work with inkjet photo paper. I have to buy special paper!

Oh, well, including the ribbon, each photograph costs around c40.

Pros: lab-level quality, photos are immediately dry, good printing speed, the printer is portable, allowing you to organize your own print party wherever you go -as long as there’s an electrical socket available-, bright LCD screen and user-friendly menus, can print from a computer, memory cards, cell phones…
Cons: prints are on the expensive side, printer is more transportable than portable, 2″ LCD screen is a tad smallish