Topic: 4 x 6 mini printer???

[astrobeck]

Hello!
Does anyone have any experience with a small 4 x 6 printers?
I'm shopping for one to take with me on road trips, ( since we can sort of do that again) to make prints as I go on my travels...
I am thinking of doing "postcards from______" where ever I happen to be, but they would be my own creations.
It might be a big pipe dream, but for now it's just stuck in my head that i want to do it.
thanks in advance for any ideas.

P.S. this seems like it is a digital centric inquiry, but I have just scanned Instax stuff with my phone in the past and sent it to family, so there is an analog element involved, so don't throw me to the wolves....:-)
Beck

[Francois]

I've got a small Canon Selphy and they are really great.
The paper and the ink come in the same box. The colors are some of the best I've ever seen.
No blocking print heads or anything. You can just leave the printer on the shelf for years and it'll still work just fine.
Mine is an older version (CP900) so I had to hack the drivers a bit so that it would work in Windows 10, but that's not the case with the new ones.
It can print directly from an SD card too. And I believe the new ones also have Bluetooth and WiFi.
I really recommend it. And besides, the printer makes all kinds of fun whirring noises when it's working

[AJShepherd]

I had a Canon 4x6" dye sublimation printer once, worked just fine but then one day the drivers vanished from my Mac and I couldn't print from my computer any more. I could print from a memory card, but that was a lot of faff and i had to add blank space if I wanted to print a square image or else it would crop. Also the files from my newest digital camera wouldn't print without loading and resaving them in Photoshop!

I asked Canon why they'd removed the drivers and if there was somewhere I could download them from.

They essentially told me to buy a new printer, because despite the fact that my old one used the same print packs as the new ones, and worked at the same resolution, my old one was 'too old' to support (I'd only had it a few years) any more so they'd pulled the drivers.

And that is why I won't touch a Canon printer again.

[Francois]

I had a similar problem on windows. They told me that signing the drivers would cost too much.
So I spent some time googling until I found a set of drivers that had been modified a bit.
Installing them involved going into safe mode with driver signing disabled, installing the drivers in compatibility mode and then rebooting into normal mode. Now it runs just like it's supposed to.

When it comes to things like that, it's often worth looking for hacked versions and then submitting the file to virustotal just to be safe.

[cs1]

There's a very easy other way to still use and old Selphy printer if you're tech savvy: you can use a Raspberry Pi with any Linux distro, install CUPS and it will recognise even old Selphy printers. You can then expose the USB connected Selphy to the local network as a network printer. I use it to print from my Mac for which Canon doesn't provide drivers anymore.

One quick note about Selphy printers: while the cost per print isn't low, it's still acceptable for mobile printing. However, printing produces quite a large amount of trash which I don't like very much (though I still use my old Selphy because buying a new non-Selphy printer will produce more trash than keep using the old Selphy).

[astrobeck]

okay, I'm convinced I want to do this....

But, what's considered an old Selphy model.

Should i try to find one of those or just go new and be done with it?
thanks every one!

[Francois]

They're not all that expensive if I remember.
Check to see if the cassettes are available as without ink they are useless.
Mine takes KP-108IN cassettes that are compatible with the following:
    Canon SELPHY CP1200
    Canon SELPHY CP1300
    Canon SELPHY CP800
    Canon SELPHY CP910
    Canon Selphy CP770
    Canon Selphy CP780
    Canon Selphy CP790
    Canon Selphy CP800
    Canon Selphy CP900

They also have models that use the Zink technology. But I don't think these produce colors that are as nice. Also their prints are quite small.
They also have models that make square photos... I don't know how they are but I would not be tempted to go for one as it restricts the size and proportions of the photos you print.

[cs1]

It's hard to tell, whether getting an old one is a good idea. It really depends on how you want to use it and what you pain threshold is for fiddling with IT. My old Selphy CP760 is still working nicely, however, it won't print any huge digital files from SD or USB stick so using it as a network printer via Raspberry Pi + CUPS is the only option that I have. TL;DR: If you feel comfortable with fiddling with IT stuff, it's a good option to get an old one. If not, I'd probably go for a recent one.

[Francois]

The thing with those is that I don't know how long the heating elements last.