Most people now own a digital camera and love to take photos pretty often. This is why buying a photo printer makes a lot of sense. Aside from seeing the photos you shot on your computer’s screen you may also print them out and enjoy framing them or putting them in albums. Some dedicated photo printers can be pretty expensive but they offer amazing photo quality.




If it’s budget photo printers you’re looking for, however, that’s not hard to find either. On top of low prices most budget photo printers also offer another advantage, that of portability, since most of the devices included in this category are compact portable printers. As a general idea, there are lots of offerings on the market that can be found even for under $100. The photo quality of most of them isn’t exactly of the professional kind but doesn’t disappoint either.

One of the top manufacturers of such printers is Canon. Their Selphy line cleverly combines affordability with friendly family-oriented designs, good quality and good portability. The Selphy CP780 offers vivid and impressive photographs. For a bit under $100 it’s the ideal printer for family use. The only bad point to it is that you’ll have to acquire both the Bluetooth adapter and battery separately which obviously means a lot more money to spend for getting this printer to actually be portable.

The Selphy CP790, a slightly more expensive brother of the CP780 comes with a friendly bucket-like design that’s also pretty functional because you can house the photo paper and anything else you might need right under the printer, grab the bucket by the handle and go have a picnic with printing involved. Bluetooth and the battery are also optional so it looks like if you’re going to buy Canon you’ll have to expect to spend some extra money on top of what you already payed for the actual printer.

Even if it’s maybe a bit less popular than Canon for users, Epson manufactures portable printers that were best rated by all reviewing websites and magazines. Out of their lineup we can mention the PictureMate Charm, Dash and Zoom, which, aside from the funny names all offer great features and photo quality. With the PictureMate Charm you’ll also get some basic photo editing tools. Battery and Bluetooth remain optional even for Epson.

Finally, a new technology called zink allowed the creation of several extremely small and compact photo printers. Zink stands for zero ink and means that instead of using ink for printing (like most printers do) these odd little printers use a special type of paper and heat to produce photography.

Since the technology is still new, there are only a few printers using zink printing at the moment out of which you can currently get Dell’s Wasabi, the Polaroid Pogo or Tomy Xiao TIP-521. What all these printers have in common is an extremely small and portable form factor. The only bad part is that these printers are small enough to limit you to 2 by 3 inch photo paper, which might be a bit too little for most users. Still, Zink printers are very fun to try and retail for affordable prices.

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