Best Portable Photo Printers
We tested mini printers from Canon, Fujifilm, HP, and Kodak that promise instant prints, and found big differences in speed, convenience, and portability
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While it’s fine to store your pictures on your cell phone, something magical happens when you actually hand someone a photo at a party and laugh about your best friend’s silly hat together. A snapshot can become something like an event.
Printer companies are finding ways to make these moments easier to come by with a new generation of portable photo printers. These devices can be truly tiny—the littlest ones will fit in your pants pocket, while the biggest ones can be easily carried in a medium-sized purse. They’re also relatively inexpensive, ranging in price from around $70 to just over $100.
I evaluated models from four different companies. They print using three distinct technologies (more on that below), but they all allow you to do the same thing: Take the printer to where the fun is and print out a physical keepsake in around a minute.
Each printer comes with its own smartphone app; you simply load your photo library (or whichever photos you’d like to share) and press Print. Out pops an image that’s completely dry and ready to share within a matter of seconds. A couple of models let you watch the images emerge during the printing process. That isn’t an advantage if you’re in a rush but can be a plus at a party.
Photo: Allen St. John/Consumer Reports Photo: Allen St. John/Consumer Reports
Unlike the other models I tried, the Canon Selphy CP1300 isn’t exactly cute. It looks like a regular printer that was left in the dryer too long. And while it’s a fraction of the size of your office printer, it’s still significantly bigger than the other portables in this roundup. It’s an easy fit in a bag, but it’s not remotely pocketable.
While the other printers can be hand-held while you’re printing a photo or two, the Selphy CP1300, with a paper tray that hangs off the front, really needs to sit on a table or other flat surface. (The Canon has an optional battery for around $50, but this printer feels like it was designed to be plugged in.)
The flip side is that the 4x6-inch prints that the Selphy CP1300 delivers are much larger than the pictures from other mini photo printers. And they look great.
Similar to the output from a more expensive inkjet, the Selphy’s skin tones are spot on, the colors are rich but balanced, and the shadows and highlights both retain plenty of detail. And despite the Canon’s edge in size and quality, its price-per-print is actually lower than the cost for the other models.
The Selphy uses a dye sublimation technology, so each of three colors (yellow, cyan, and magenta, as well as a clear overcoat) gets applied with a distinct pass through the printer, and you can watch as the image is built. It’s a different sort of a show than the Instax provides (below), but it’s still fun.
No, it’s not nearly as portable as its competitors, but if there’s a chance the prints from your event might end up in a frame, the Selphy is the clear winner.
The Kodak Step is tiny, and it fit comfortably in my jeans pocket. At 4.5x3 inches and just a bit over 6 ounces, it’s the most petite printer we tried, just a wee bit smaller than the similar HP Sprocket (below). Its glossy white plastic finish is reminiscent of early Apple products, but basically the Step looks like it could be a battery pack for a phone or an external drive for a laptop. At around $70, it’s also the least expensive model I tried.
The Kodak uses Zink film that delivers 2x3-inch borderless prints. Once you press Print, the Kodak spits out a photo that’s dry and ready to handle, pretty much like your regular printer.
A Zink print from the Step looks like it was taken in a room bathed in candlelight. The colors are warm and vibrant. Are they accurate? No. In some photos, the Kodak’s golden-hour effect can be very flattering. With other images, skin tones take on a yellow cast and look artificial. You can tweak the color temperature on any individual shot in the app, but I feel like a portable printer should work in a set-it-and-forget-it way, so this earns the Step a slight demerit.
The Sprocket is just a smidgen bigger than the Kodak Step (above), and the case’s matte finish makes it a little more difficult to slide into a jeans pocket. The Sprocket is also a bit more expensive than the Kodak. It, too, takes 2x3-inch Zink photo paper.
The Sprocket works quite similarly to the Kodak—the photo is expelled with no fuss, so the biggest difference comes down to the HP app. I found the HP app to be a bit fussier to use. If you want to go into the business of sending out tiny greeting cards, the holiday-specific borders you can apply to your photo before printing might be an advantage. Me? I found the Kodak’s selection—autumn leaves rather than Happy Thanksgiving—to be more useful.
On images taken outdoors, I found that the HP delivers colors that are a bit truer to life than the Kodak’s. On the other hand, the images are quite contrasty, with the shadows going dark and the highlights a bit washed out, a bit like a not-great photocopy of a photo. I think the HP’s flaws resulted in photos that were a little less attractive than the Kodak’s, and the color balance issues were harder to fix in the app. But, overall, there was very little difference between these two devices.
The Instax is quite a bit bigger than the two Zink printers. While it slips easily into a purse or bag, it didn’t fit into my jeans pocket. Even though the Instax printer is larger, the images are smaller. They measure 1 13/16 x 2 ½ inches, and some of that area is taken up by a wide white border.
Instax prints its photos on film that looks a lot like what you used to get from an old Polaroid SX-70 instant camera. The photo is plain white at first, but over the course of about 45 seconds the image magically appears. It’s a neat trick.
While the develop-before-your-eyes processing is entertaining, the image from the Instax is merely okay. The photos’ color and contrast are more true to our reference image than the Zink models’. But the photos are washed out, with less-than-saturated colors and deep shadows that are more charcoal grey than black.
Instax film is also significantly more expensive than the Zink film, and because it’s photo-sensitive, you’d ruin a batch of film if you accidentally popped the back open. And, of course, you can’t just take a peek inside the printer to see how much paper you have left.
I found the Instax app kind of hard to use, with at least one weird quirk. It treated the many photos on my iPhone taken in Live mode as video clips, and couldn’t print them until I went back into my iPhone Photos app and changed the settings on each image. The app includes some games and offers more ways to decorate an image than the Zink models, which might appeal to a youngster who has the patience to explore this printer’s fun features.
Which Portable Photo Printer Should You Buy?
Each of these printers did what they promised, albeit with some limitations, and I think any of them will turn up the fun factor at a party. The Kodak Step offers the best value if image quality doesn’t matter that much—it’s the smallest and least expensive option. And even if the colors aren’t completely accurate, the photos are attractive. The HP Sprocket is very similar and would also be a decent choice.
The Fujifilm Instax printer is bigger, but it produces photos that were slightly smaller, less attractive, and more expensive—which makes the model hard to recommend. But if watching the prints bloom before your eyes fills you with wonder (or nostalgia), you’re likely to enjoy it.
The Canon feels like a slightly different kind of device. Big and full of buttons, it’s not nearly as whimsical as the other portable printers. But its bold 4x6 prints win the day. While the other printers feel best suited to popping out quick keepsakes at a New Year’s Eve Party, the Canon Selphy CP1300 would hold its own at a family reunion or a wedding rehearsal dinner.
How I Chose Portable Photo Printers to Test
With the help of CR product analyst Cesar Carroll, I narrowed down the choices to printers that were popular, widely available, and inexpensive—all the models slotted between $70 and $110. There are three competing technologies in portable printers (see below), and my test group included at least one of each.
How I Evaluated the Portable Photo Printers
I began testing these portable printers the way Consumer Reports tests full-sized printers in its labs. I started with a reference image provided by Rich Sulin, our head of printer testing. At first glance, it’s a casual shot of a group of friends in the park, but it’s very challenging for a printer to handle well, because there’s a mix of shadows and highlights, a broad spectrum of colors in the subjects’ clothing and the background, and a variety of skin tones.
I printed that image on the portable printers and compared them with prints produced by both low- and high-performing full-sized models from CR’s extensive printer testing program. I’m an experienced amateur photographer, not a CR test engineer, but it was easy to spot differences among all these prints in color accuracy, contrast, black levels, and other elements of photo reproduction.
I followed that up by printing images of all kinds from the hundreds of photos on my phone. I selected a variety of shots taken in different lighting conditions, ranging from selfies at a nighttime concert to my dog Rugby trying on my favorite T-shirt in my sun-dabbled bedroom.
To determine the price per print, we used the retail street price of a 100-sheet box of paper (or the closest size available) and divided it by the number of photos it would yield. For the Canon, this refill set included both the ink cassettes and the paper; that’s the total used to calculate the price.
Film Technologies
Zink stands for “zero ink.” There’s no ink cartridge like you’d find in a regular color printer. Instead, a Zink printer uses special photo paper that contains embedded dye crystals that are activated during the printing process.
Instax prints contain both a dye and a developer. As the sheet is ejected from the printer, it’s run through rollers that break the microscopic beads of developer and spread the chemical across the sheet, activating photo-sensitive elements in the paper to produce the image.
Canon’s Selphy printer uses a thermal dye sublimation process. It’s similar (but not identical) to the way images are printed on T-shirts, mugs, and other products. During the printing process, a ribbon inside the printer is heated to a gaseous state and the image is transferred to the special paper, where it cools back down rapidly.
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