The fourth printer, from Polaroid, uses that company's Type 500 instant film pack. To test each device, we printed digital photographs of a range of subjects and asked our panel to rate the quality of each print. Independent research by Wilhelm Research has shown that while prints from every type of printer fade eventually, dye-sublimation prints remain vivid much longer than prints from ink jet printers. Plus, the printers we looked at cost less than the PhotoSmart. Of the portable printers we review here, Sony's DPP-SV55 provides the best combination of print quality and low price, and it earns our Best Buy award.
Heat diffuses the dye onto specially treated paper.
Prints from the models we tested were between 80 and 90 cents each, compared with about 30 cents per print to develop standard film. But because you're printing digital shots, you can choose only the photos you want. Printers based on dye-sublimation technology are also expensive to manufacture, and the cost increases as the printing area gets bigger. With DPOF, you preview the images and mark those you want to print before taking the media out of the camera. Then you put the memory card in the printer, and it picks the tagged shots and turns them into prints.