The IT Nerd

Printing out photos in the day and age of smartphones seems kind of 2008. But there are those who want to print out high quality photos for the grandparents or whomever and don’t want to go to the drugstore to do it. For those people there’s not a whole lot of choice out there. Thus the Canon SELPHY CP900 Compact Photo Printer is a bit of a niche product. But it’s a very good printer if you need to print 4×6 photos.

The physical set up was easy:

• Slide the dye roll in the side.
• Load paper in the paper tray and insert the tray in the front. You should note that the tray adds about 7 inches to the printer’s depth. Plus you should leave some space behind the printer for reasons I will explain in a moment.
• Pug in the power adaptor.
• Flip up the 2.7-inch screen to make the display easier to read.

Then you hook it up to your computer. Actually,  you don’t have to hook it up to a computer via USB if you don’t want to. It’s got built in 802.11 B/G WiFi plus it will print directly from memory cards, USB memory keys, and PictBridge cameras. That makes it very versatile and that came in handy for me during testing. My wife and I have Macs and we both run OS X Mavericks and there were no drivers for the printer available for Mavericks. That was a bit disappointing as Mavericks has been out for a while now and I would have hoped that Canon would have them available by now. But it didn’t stop me from testing the printer as I was able to print from my iPhone 5 using Canon Easy PhotoPrint for iOS, and you do need to use this app as the printer is not AirPrint compatible. For those of you on Android, there’s a version of this application for you as well. In any case, setting it up on WiFi was dead easy as a wizard walks you through the process. Once it was on my network, I was able print pictures from my iPhone 5. Printing from my Canon camera which is PictBridge compatible,  a memory card or USB memory stick was easy as well. All I had to do was follow the built-in menu to print and you don’t have to crack the manual open at all. The menus are self-explanatory and they offer some basic editing features including the ability to crop the image for example.

It took about 60 seconds to print a photo and it was nearly silent while printing. The quality was easily as good as you’d get with the photo printing machines you get in your local drugstore. One thing to note is that when it prints, it pulls the 4×6 paper from the paper tray in the front, through the printer, out the back, and then reverses the paper back through the printer. Then it repeats that process a few more times before depositing the photo on the tray at the front of the printer. Thus you have to make sure there’s space at the back of the printer so that the photo doesn’t get crushed.

Downsides? Other than the lack of Mavericks drivers, I could not find anything to complain about. The Canon SELPHY CP900 compact photo printer is a very good photo printer. It retails for $109.99 CAD and comes in black and white. There is an optional battery pack which allows you to print anywhere and that is $169.99. When it comes to supplies like ink or paper, a 108 sheet pack of 4×6 paper with ink is $44.99. Not everybody needs one of these printers. But those who do will find this printer to be exactly what they need to print high quality 4×6 photo pictures.

This entry was posted on January 27, 2014 at 6:57 am and is filed under Products with tags Canon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.