CANON SELPHY CP1500 PRINTER

The revamped Canon SELPHY CP1500 portable photo printer is sleeker, faster and better connected

The Canon SELPHY CP1500 is sold in black, white or baby pink options, each with a smart and stylish finish.

Measuring 182x133x58mm and weighing in at 850g, it's a little smaller and lighter than the preceding SELPHY CP1300 printer, for which it's a direct replacement. As such, it's a highly capable mobile photo printer that runs on dye-sublimation technology, so there's no messy ink to worry about. Instead, each specialist sheet of paper is fed through the printer four times, where cyan, magenta and yellow dyes are added successively, followed by a final protective, smudge and fingerprint resistant coating which should also ensure longevity of more than 100 years.

The SELPHY CP1500 features a 300x300dpi print resolution, which is typical of dye-sub printers. It might not sound much compared with inkjet printers but a crucial difference is that coloured dyes can be laid on top of each other, whereas droplets of different coloured ink from an inkjet printer need to be placed adjacently. The net result is that 300dpi is perfectly sufficient for high-resolution, dye-sub photo printing. As a mobile printer, it's an essential feature that the CP1500 is able to output photo prints without the need for it to be plugged into a computer or laptop. As such, it has a built-in LCD colour screen and a supporting cast of standalone control buttons. The whole interface is extensively redesigned compared to the preceding SELPHY CP1300.

The LCD screen is larger at 3.5-inch instead of 3.2-inch, and the design looks less cluttered with fewer buttons. Although larger, the screen is fixed and lacks the tilt function of the previous model, and it's still not a touchscreen.