The market for specialised compact photo printers remains relatively small, but as prices come down for printers and digital cameras, they are becoming more popular. As digital camera prices come down and more cameras have direct printer connectivity, a small photo printer becomes a viable accessory.
The $1,400 you would have needed for a reasonable quality digital camera 18 months ago will now get you a good camera and a printer and leave some change in your pocket.
The PS130 produces six by four prints on a range of papers from plain to photocard and uses a single standard PhotoREt III tricolour ink cartridge.
It can be operated independent of any computer either by connecting it directly to your digital camera or by extracting images from a range of memory cards including SD, MMC, CompactFlash and MemoryStick.
Once the camera or memory card is connected you can print out an index page of thumbnails of all of the available images. From there it's a simple matter of selecting the images you want to print and ordering them from the printer.
While it still requires a main power supply, the PS130 is compact enough to carry around with you in your camera bag and takes just a few seconds to set up.
The quality of the prints varies depending on the colours in the image. The printer handles vibrant colours particularly well but is nowhere near as impressive in its default settings when handling pale images in which yellows or creams are dominant. However, that can be improved by adjusting the colour settings via printer software.
The PS130 has two main settings: PhotoREt III and 4,800 x 1,200dpi Optimised. The latter requires a PC with 400MB of free hard drive space during the print process and is only really suitable for 600dpi images.
On PhotoREt III it will whisk up a good quality postcard print in about 90 seconds.
At $299 for the printer, $72.95 for additional ink cartridges and the additional cost of a constant supply of various papers, photo printing is still not cheap. However, if you are an enthusiast the PS130 has a lot going for it.