... is excellent- I have an olympus printer at home that does a great job of converting my digital snaps into dead-tree formats, and I very nearly bought the selphy reviewed for my dad's 63rd birthday at the weekend.

But, by Christ, the price! There's a triple pack of the prints and cartridges for £35 which helps the running cost down, but there's a high entry cost with the printer itself. Hardware companies having their cake and eating it, I think.

And yes, my olympus foxed me with the cartridge for the paper too (but it came with a 100 print starter pack, and all for £100)

Amazon in the USA have this thing for $90.76 right now. At todays exchange rate, that's £55.10. More than double what is is (£119.21) on Amazon UK for example. There's no way that the price difference should be so high - someone (Canon maybe) is profiteering on this one in the UK at least.

It's a shame - I love my Canon G10 camera, but I got a Sony photo printer to go with it - just as good, just as fast, but more reasonably priced, and better priced consumables.

6x4 is a different shape to the image recorded by most digicams, which is 4x3.

I bought one of the original dye-sub Selphys about 3 years ago to go with my 350D. It was terrible. The pictures all had a wonderful green tinge to them, even after correction in Photoshop etc. Plus the prints all had print streaks across them when held up to the light.

Not good. What was even more annoying was my Gf's grandfather was able to get far better results with his £60 Kodak printer/camera combo.

I paid full price for mine (it had only been available about a month) but returned it a day or so later. I also noticed that retailers dropped the price by around £90 a week or so later! Thats the mark of a quality product!

....local stand up kodak kiosk thing, about 10p a print.....online about the same. so you are paying 6x the price to do it at home. Hell, printing 20 prints it would be cheaper to drive, pay to park, buy lunch and a pint, and then get the prints done!

for instant gratification if you want one of these things.

When I order our metric equivalent of 4x6 prints online I pay 12p for good paper or 16p for excellent silk paper. For the price of the printer I could pay shipping 50 times.

Unless you really (reallyreally. Say you're working in a way that involved Polaroids before) have to have prints instantly for whatever reason (or have more money than sense) I do not see the appeal of these things. Nutjob expensive, locked into specialized products, and always at the mercy of consumer-grade hardware. No thanks.

Pre-bought 500 18x13 cm prints at my local lab (member of a nation wide franchise ring) : 150 € ; that's 0.30 €/print. They're at foot reach, but I could as well trade with them by internet and get the prints by mail the next day. It's not the best bargain, but the quality is decently constant. And they won't make me pay for their mistakes, so I don't pay for botched prints (and being an ex-wet lab afficionado, I can tell you there's always waste to calibration and various tries). They've got a range of products from postcards to binded books you can print your photos on.Trade off : their minilab knows only about Jpeg in sRGB colourspace. Could certainly do fancier things, but that would imply training the already underpaid workforce. I know another, more professional lab, that will happily let you download their printer icm profile and print exactly what you send them ; better know what you're doing beforehand, because it's a no money back option (if you miss your prophoto conversion, you can get nasty out of gamut imaginary colours), but still it's way less expensive than the Shelpy.

So, to make sense, the Shelpy should offer me complete control over the prints, but your review doesn't cover that area (specifically the colourspace profile of the device, and how you can match whatever your camera outputs to that colourspace). I'm making a wild guess here, but by the sound of it the process is closer to CMYK printing than ink printing. So we can expect a quite narrow gamut. Even low end cameras have a massively wider colourspace to save your pictures to, and matching the colours is the most important part of the work. Not doing it is like buying the latest yamaha motorbike and wrapping gardenhose over the wheels instead of proper tyres, "because they're both rubber, you know".

I wish your review had addressed this important area. If I can't have more control over the process than giving a correct sRGB file to my local lab and asking them to keep their hands in their pockets (which they happily do), I can't see the value of this printer.

I know I just poo-poo everything but come on...

Who orders 6x4 prints these days - too small!

As the verdict rightly summises, these things are just too expensive to run - there are plenty of online stores with easy upload, multiple format options, and quick turn around - all for a fraction of the price.

For the rare occasions I need a physical print, I'll stick with my Samsung SP-2020 which I picked up for £14 a couple of years ago and produces perfectly acceptable prints, the match of most of the kiosk printout things. With a 120 pack of paper/ribbon only costing £20, it provides prints at less than 20p each which is a fair premium over online/Costco etc. for the convenience of having a print in under 2 minutes, including getting the thing out of a drawer and hooking it up.

Can't imagine why anyone would pay 3 times this much for what is still a very small print. If colour accuracy etc. is important to you the you're unlikely to be satisfied with a 6x4" print from your EOS 5D shots.