Canon SELPHY CP760 Compact Photo Printer (2565B001) Top Quality

If you absolutely have to do your own printing, this is a good printer to buy. Bottom line: most photo labs will print cheaper, with better quality control, with known sizing, and with known print lifetime.

Quality: This dye-sublimation printer will match the quality of a lab. The prints are clear and well colored. (I use a color calibration tool for my monitor, so I know the colors are correct out of the printer. I suspect that may be the problem with other reviewers who have complained of mismatched color.)

Cost: you are looking at about $60 to buy the unit, plus $0.27 per print. Photo labs tend to start at $0.19 per print. You pay extra for the convenience of print-it-here-and-now, but it's not too bad of a cost. The "sample media" provided by Canon was good for exactly 5 prints. Be sure to buy your first 108-pack if you order this printer.

Quality control: A dye-sub printer will (in my experience) give more consistent quality than an inkjet. Inks dry out, colored films do not. Ink nozzles can block up, leaving streaks in your prints, colored films do not. Even so, an imperfection in the ribbon or the paper will be visible in your prints. I've already seen this happen with this unit in the 3rd image that I printed. There is a bright green spot in my print where the magenta film had a defect. This is another win for a lab: if I'd received this print from a lab, I could get them to reprint it for free. To redo it myself will cost me another $0.27 for the new print.

Sizing: as has already been mentioned in another review, the sizing of 4x6 prints is about 3-15/16" by 5-13/16", when printing "borderless" on the perforated 4x6 sheets. Any professional printer will tell you that you have to plan for bleed space when you send imagery for printing, and this is a good example. Don't print pictures with the content all the way up to the edges, or you will be disappointed when it gets cut off. This is probably true of your photo lab as well, so plan ahead and save yourself the grief. Note as well that the aspect ratio of a 4x6 print is 3:2 and the aspect ratio of most point-and-shoot cameras is 4:3. Some labs will offer 4.5x6 prints for this very reason, to avoid cropping the image. There are no cropping/positioning tools on the printer, so you'll want to pre-crop in your favorite image editor before sending 4:3 images to this printer. That or shoot with a DSLR that has a 3:2 ratio sensor anyway (All current Canon and Nikon SLRs).

Lifetime: Photo lab prints done on photographic paper have been around dozens of years. Their long-term resistance to fading is well known. Printer paper and dye-sublimation inks are not nearly so well known. I had an older (circa 2001) Olympus dye-sublimation photo printer, and the prints that I still have from that machine have NOT lasted. The colors have separated unevenly, or faded away entirely in some cases. I'm glad I didn't trust anything important to that medium. Canon claims prints from this printer will last 100 years. I'm hoping so.Get more detail about Canon SELPHY CP760 Compact Photo Printer (2565B001).