Summary: Sony Digital Printer- DPP SV55
Comment: Great Unit, makes beautiful pix. Each time you print 25-30 pix on 3x5 or 4x6 you put in a new ribbon cartridge which comes with the paper. Couldn't be happier, paid a very reasonable price from VDO Specialities. Great outfit to do business with! They were concerned with some early misgivings I had and called me! Offered to refund and pay for return, said they were going to refund my money anyway because of the misunderstanding! Guy named Mike Walker, super to do busines with!Highly recommend VDO Specialties!!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unreliable
Comment: Works great for awhile. A few months down the road, the printer will jam. It will eventuallt cease to work. I exchanged this printer three times, and the same things happened each time. Get a nice HP photo printer and never worry again!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent photos depending on OS
Comment: I installed the driver software on my Windows 2000 laptop and was immediately getting great prints -- one of the easiest Windows installations I've had. (Note that I'm just using this product to print from PCs, not directly from memory stick/card.)
I'm using "small format" prints (4"x3") because the source is my kids' JamCam digital camera which has sub-megapixel resolution (640x480 I think). I used Mozilla 1.3 to print from because it has a nice preview feature and image scaling. As it turns out I got glossy photos with beautiful color and no visible pixelation when printing from Windows 2000.
However, the prints I got from my iMac and from my Windows 98 PC were not quite as nice! In both cases close inspection yielded visible pixelation on the borders of subjects in the image. Furthermore, with Windows 98, the number of colors was reduced, with visible transitions from one shade to the next.
Perhaps the pixelation is simply because of the low-resolution source material, and that Windows 2000 has a better dithering algorithm for smoothing these pixels -- that is, maybe this won't affect you if you own a megapixel camera. But I can't explain the lack of color ranges on Windows 98.
Anyway, if you have Win2K, the prints are truly comparable to Kodak prints from an analog camera and the ease of use is excellent.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WOW... amazing!
Comment: Impressive. VERY close to photo-lab quality, you'd need a magnifying glass to tell the difference at 4x6. Even then I don't know if you could tell the difference. I'm using a 3.2 Megapixel Sony P7 and the results are phenomenal. Hard to believe given the relatively low price of the unit.
My only complaint is that the instructions are a little weak. Also, even though my computer (running XP) recognized the printer when I plugged it into the USB port, I still had to install the CD Rom. No big deal, once I installed I was up and running.
Overall-- highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Easy to use, but I had to buy it elsewhere
Comment: While the printer itself seems of good quality and is very easy to use, let me first say that after waiting for over a month for Amazon to get this item in stock, I had to purchase it elsewhere (at a higher price, but I already have it now to use, instead of still being on the backorder list).
Setup: too simple! Plug everything in, load the PC drivers, bring up your favorite photo program and away you go. 4x6 borderless prints in no time at all. I had no driver problems using Windows ME (as others have stated). The paper is easy to load, the printing ribbon simply slides into place, and the quality is on par with commercial prints I have had made in the past. I haven't used the built-in features (since I prefer to enhance, crop, mess with photos on my PC before printing) but they look fairly straightforward.
Out of the box to prints in hand in about 15 minutes. Can't beat that!