I didn’t mention this one before, because it wasn’t supposed to be a Christmas present for me. It has, however, become so.

My wife has often complained that we don’t print enough photos. Most of the photos she’s referring to come in to her iphone – often photographs of grandchildren sent to us by their parents. She wants to print them and then display them in frames.

The problem is that I always got the job of printing them – a fairly tortured process involving sending them by email from her to me; me downloading them to my computer, importing them into Lightroom and trying to improve them; and then finally downloading them to a usb drive, taking it to CVS or somewhere and then printing them.

One day, while browsing through my photography feeds I came across a review of the above printer, a Canon Selphy CP 1200, which would print directly from her iphone via wireless.

Perfect, I thought – wrong! What I failed to realize is that to my wife printing photographs is clearly my responsibility and no matter how easy I make for her to do it herself it will remain my responsibility. So this is how the printer became my Christmas present rather than hers.

I thought about returning it, but then decided to keep it and I’m glad I did. I quite like the results it produces. Printing directly from the iphone leaves something to be desired as you can’t control the cropping and I don’t always like the way it crops. I find it’s better if I download the pictures to a USB drive and then plug this directly into the printer. This way I have better control over the cropping (it still tends to crop more than it shows on the printer’s screen though). Of course, this doesn’t help my tortured process much other than eliminating the trip to CVS (which is not to be sniffed at as it’s about a one hour round trip).

I also find it fascinating to watch to printer at work. First it prints a yellow layer and spits it out. Then it sucks it back in, prints a magenta layer and spits it out. It repeats this process twice more, each time printing a layer (cyan followed by white) spitting it out and sucking it back in until its finished. The whole process takes no more that a few seconds.

Of course you’re limited to 4×6 pictures, but that’s fine. If I want larger printers I’ll spend more time and effort getting them done. It will, however, print multiple copies on a single sheet of 4×6 paper. I had my doubts about how well it would print black and white, but I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

While not perfect it’s a handy device to have for small, quick, snapshot prints.