Issue #0621/1 - With discounts of up to 67%, portable printers can be as inexpensive to buy as desktop models but not because manufacturers have cut prices.
Portable printers for 6×4 (10×15) photo printing were hailed as exciting and innovative when they were launched several years ago. Now we see some ink jet versions on sale in some retail outlets at less than half of their original price.
The original compactphoto printer Hewlett-Packard
Photosmart 130
Certainly when desktop inkjet printers are available at well under the £50 mark, there is little justification for a comparable portable printer to be priced much higher. There does seem to be a bit of a shake-up occurring in the industry with both Dell (dye-sublimation) and Lexmark (inkjet) pulling their machines off the market.
It is not know whether either of these withdrawals is permanent or not but it is rumoured that Dell will be working more closely with Kodak. Kodak itself appears to be in the doldrums at the moment, having removed its entire range of inkjet photographic papers from the market and replaced them with new developments.
In Lexmark’s case, the withdrawal is most likely to be driven by recognition that there is little opportunity for that particular company to achieve volume ink sales from its single-model offering. Not being a desktop A4 printer, the printer is used only for photographs. It then depends entirely on photo printing volumes for the frequency of cartridge purchasing and, as these devices are largely targeted at the ‘soccer mum’, volumes may be relatively low.
Following Dell’s withdrawal, the dye-sublimation machines are brought to market mainly by Canon and Kodak. Dye-sublimation technology has the advantage that all prints come at a known and consistent cost because of the nature of the technology and its consumables. There is no scope for variable print costs as there is with inkjet printers. The downside is that prints are not as durable as the latest generation inkjet prints.
Wilhelm Imaging Research (WIR – independent specialist test laboratories) tests all the materials from printer manufacturers for light fastness and rates the Display Permanence for dye-sublimation prints to be as low as 4 years (Sony DPP EX5). Canon’s compact printers (CP series) come out a little better, at 7 years but it is Kodak materials that appear to be most durable, with a permanence rating of 42 years.
Even 42 years compares poorly with the latest generations of inkjet technology (ink and paper combinations). For instance, Hewlett-Packard’s Vivera inks in the standard tricolour configuration, when used with HP Premium Plus photo paper, have a permanence rating of 82 years.
Epson PictureMate 100Interestingly, using the photo inks in a printer as well as the primary inks appears to improve permanence dramatically. WIR rates the same standard tricolour cartridge used in conjunction with the tricolour photo cartridge at 108 years. Furthermore, the No.57 tricolour cartridge printing on HP Premium Plus photo paper is rated at 18 years but, when combined with the No.58 cartridge, the permanence shoots up to 73 years!
Epson’s PictureMate (5-ink) has a permanence rating similar to the Hewlett-Packard Vivera ink set, at 104 years, but the Canon DS series inkjet compact photo printer has a rating of only 41 years.
Canon SELPHY DS81Note that Canon specifies a rating of 100 years in its data for the CP dye-sublimation printers but this is for storage in an album and is therefore not comparable with the standardised testing undertaken by WIR where prints are displayed under glass. Storage in an album will always be better than displayed under glass.
It should also be noted that the display permanence rating for silver halide photo prints is also significantly lower than the ratings for latest generation inkjet prints, with prints from Kodak (Ektacolor Edge Generations paper) rated at just 26 years and Fuji (Crystal Archive paper) at 40 years.
Just to complete the picture, Hewlett-Packard’s B9180 professional A3 photo printer (available as of September this year) has been rated by WIR at ‘more then 200 years’!
Kodak EASYSHAREPrinter Dock Series 3
However, returning to the printers themselves, so confident is Canon in the longevity of mobile photo printers that it looks to be increasing the number of models available. Add to this the dye-sublimation models from Kodak, inkjet models from Epson and Hewlett-Packard and there is plenty of choice.
Here we should underline one of the frustrations experienced when researching currently available products.
Company web sites are not always fully accurate. Three of the models listed on Kodak’s web site appear not to be available any longer, while several older models are still in the channel.
Similarly, Canon has eight compact printers listed on its web site but pricing is available for only four of them, implying that the other four are no longer available.
Hewlett-PackardPhotosmart A510
Hewlett-Packard has four products on its UK web site, one of which, the Photosmart A510, is not yet available. But, there are four others listed in the pricing that are not detailed on the web site. Model numbers are frequently different in the US and the US web site shows no less than seven compact models, including the A510 and three other ‘A’ models that are listed as ‘Coming Soon’.
In one sense this is all good news. It means that there are new models being developed, that the heavy discounting is not indicative of a category in trouble and that there is more to look forward to as the category develops further.
Epson PictureMate 500Focussing on pricing, at launch four years ago the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 130 was priced at £107 (ex tax) and the Photosmart 230 was £162 (ex tax). These were originally known as a ‘camera accessory printers’.
Shortly afterwards came Epson’s original PictureMate, priced at £126.81 (ex tax) at launch.
With current list prices ranging from £73 to £183 and the PictureMate 500 costing the same as the original PictureMate, we can reckon that list prices have changed little. The change there has been is to widen the range of prices between the bottom end of the ranges and the top as the category has developed and more machines have joined the line-up. Street prices, however, are rather different with some very heavy discounting occurring.
In the accompanying table, we have included those products that are listed on both the manufacturer’s web site and in the currently available price lists and also that are readily available through the retail channels. There is one extra addition to the list – the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 325 – because it is still in the recent price lists despite having been removed from the web site and is available at a particularly heavy discount.
|
Most readily available Compact Photo Printers - UK |
Street (inc tax) |
List (inc tax) |
Effective discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canon Selphy CP510 | £68.15 | £80.08 | 41% |
| Canon SELPHY CP600 | £120.30 | £141.35 | 39% |
| Canon SELPHY CP710 | £70.64 | £83.00 | 49% |
| Canon SELPHY DS810 | £62.50 | £73.44 | 55% |
| Epson PictureMate 100 | £41.20 | £99.01 | 58% |
| Epson PictureMate 500 | £69.45 | £149.00 | 53% |
| HP Photosmart 325 (old) | £39.95 | £122.20 | 67% |
| HP Photosmart 335 | £34.10 | £99.88 | 66% |
| HP Photosmart 375 | £109.00 | £183.30 | 41% |
| HP Photosmart 385 | £73.11 | £151.58 | 52% |
| EASYSHARE Printer Dock Series 3 | £74.00 | £129.99 | 43% |
These street prices are the lowest visible at the time of writing and therefore represent maximum discounting rather than average street price and all are shown inclusive of tax.
With discounts ranging between 39% and 67%, it is quite clearly worth the buyers’ while shopping around for the best deal available, especially if they are not operating to any self-imposed code of loyalty or have specific thoughts on which model is most suited to their needs. However, it is noticeable that the highest discounts tend to be on the older products that are probably in the process of being discontinued by the manufacturer.
Hewlett-PackardPhotosmart 335
This particularly applies to Hewlett-Packard’s Photosmart 325 (no longer on the Hewlett-Packard web site). In addition, the Photosmart 335 has been on the market for a year and will be due for replacement when the new models are released. Note that several models that were launched after the Photosmart 335 have already been removed from the web site although they still appear in the price list.
To come full circle, these printers may cost rather more than their A4 counterparts to purchase but that doesn’t prevent them from being as exciting and innovative as when they were first introduced. Doubtless, there is further development of the category to come.
There will always be users who will buy the A4 version because it gives access to office or home-type printing capabilities but there will also be those who have no requirement for PC linked printing and for whom the portable solution will be not only more than adequate but desirable.
~End~
