Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
Printing on the go isn’t really a thing, but if you have the spare cash and want to make it something fun, the Canon Selphy CP1500 is worth a look.
What is the Selphy CP1500?
While many of us have printers for the day-to-day and schoolwork and such, the idea of the printer is gradually fading away in a lot of homes. You need it for important forms and the occasional bit of work, plus your kids might love to colour, but the age of everyone having a printer at home seems to be relegated to the past.
These days, we’re all so reliant on big touchscreens that printing isn’t always the first thing on our mind.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can still print up photos, and not just on a desktop printer. There are also smaller and portable options aimed at making photo printing fun.
That’s what Canon’s Selphy CP1500 aims to be, offering a way to print your photos in a pint-sized way that takes the photos from your phone and tablet. You can even take it on the road to go if you have an optional battery. Is it worth owning for your photos?
What does it do?
While your regular desktop ink jet printer may well rely on printing tiny drops of ink to make colours appear, dye sublimation printers handle colour in sections, printing each block of colour one by one. There’s the colours of yellow, cyan, and magenta — ink print colours — and then a laminate on top, which is what the CP1500 does.
Dye-sub technology isn’t super new, and Canon’s Selphy CP1500 is basically a variation on a theme we’ve seen before, moving a 4×6 piece of photo paper back and forth through its printer as each colour block is printed on the paper, spitting out the result after a little over 40 seconds of printing.
Getting your images to the printer is largely a wireless affair, with your phone playing the main character here: connect it to the wireless network of the Selphy CP1500, and then use Canon’s app to make the printer do its thing, selecting images and sending to the printer.
Does it do the job?
Factor in at least a good minute for each print, because you need to deal with the app, which is nice but can be a touch clunky.
An app is a better touch than no app at all, for sure, and allows you to apply some cute little stamp flourishes and stylise those photos, though selecting images can be finicky and the app can feel slow. The more this writer learns about programming by building his own app, the more he wonders if people are testing their apps, and that’s largely the feeling you get here.
Fortunately, the CP1500 is more than its app, and if you give it some room, it will do a decent job of printing.
When we say “give it some room”, we mean it: the prints will move out the back of the CP1500 during the printing process, with the screen up top telling you what part of the process you’re in. Each colour will light up, and small rollers will move the print back and forth for you, but you do need some room to let it do some work.
Once it’s finished, your print will roll out rather nicely waiting for some eager hand to pick it up and smile. And smile they should, because the prints from the Selphy CP1500 are easily pleasing to the eye.
What does it need?
Canon’s Selphy CP1500 is a fun revival on the old dye-sublimation tech, printing the various colours one block at a time, but it’s very mobile focused and can feel like it’s made for one thing: mobile owners with spare cash.
The mobile focus is pretty clear when you use the app to control the printer, though you can plug a USB key in or load photos off an SD card if you want to, and use the tiny LCD screen and hardware controls if you want to.
That makes it great for phone owners to take some printable fun with them, at least in theory. The CP1500 we reviewed, however, didn’t come with a battery, and it really needed one.
Apparently the battery for this model is optional, but really it should just be in the box. The whole thing is meant for you to have fun, yet taking it anywhere means needing a power plug. It would have a lot more value if the battery arrived with the printer.
Is it worth your money?
Priced at $249 in Australia, but with a street price closer to between $200 and $220, the Selphy CP1500 isn’t super value driven, even if it is fun. It doesn’t seem to amp up the dye-sub tech from what we’ve seen in the past, and while we’re not sure what the major differences are between the older model beyond the aesthetics, there’s a pretty notable price difference if you look at the CP1300.
Mostly, it’s all about a slightly faster printing speed, boasting a whole six seconds faster for the 41 second postcard print on the CP1500 compared to the 47 second print on the CP1300.
We’re not sure if you’re going to complain about six seconds in this fun style of printer, but if you are, that’s the difference, it seems.
There’s also the issue of consumables, which is a known problem on printers on the whole, but here in the Selphy CP1500, you’re basically accounting for $30 for 54 sheets and ink to match or around $50 for 108 sheets. OR to put it simply, that’s roughly 50 cents per print.
Compared to the cost of a desktop printer, that’s a little on the hefty side, which depending on the style of the printer and the size of its ink tanks will see you down to cents or fractions of a cent.
Of course, this isn’t a desktop printer. It doesn’t rely on ink cartridges and instead uses the three colour heat-based dye sublimation process that isn’t new, but rather is getting smaller. And small this thing is, but still uses the very specific specialty cartridge and paper it’s tied to, which means if you buy the 54 sheet pack, you’ll run out of colour when the paper runs out, and the same is true with the 108.
This printer is by no means anywhere near as cost effective as a conventional ink jet, and is more of one of those “for fun” printers that you can take with you.
If you do want to take it with you, though, consider spending on the optional extra that is the optional battery.
Canon doesn’t include the battery for the Selphy CP1500 in the box, or at least it wasn’t in our review model, and that’ll cost you around $100 for the privilege of making this printer mobile. Without the battery, you’ll need to keep the printer plugged in, making it about as mobile as any other printer, which is to say it’s not at all.
Yay or nay?
Dye sub printers may have had their day in the sun, but camera and printer makers are still keeping them alive for a good purpose: fun. Possibly fun in the sun, just don’t take this thing out to the beach.
While the Selphy CP1500 isn’t made for a lot of outdoor activities, it is a printer that can be made to go, something of a bit of a rarity. Provided, that is, you spend on the $80-odd optional battery.
In short, it’s fun with a catch: spend on the battery and the only catch you have left is the price of consumables – ink and paper.
We’re not sure we’d be so desperate to need a print or two in the middle of nowhere, but that’s really what this caters for, making printing more fun than sitting in front of your computer and waiting for the print to emerge. This can awaken the printing spirit anywhere (if there ever was such a thing) and gives you a souvenir of your adventures in about a minute.
And kids love it, watching the printer make their photos come to life colour by colour, feeding the photo in and out until it’s finished.
Most people with a printer already won’t be the target market of this thing, and that’s fine. The price of consumables probably will leave this as little more than a fun gimmick for most, much like what Zink portable printers have become: the digital equivalent of a Polaroid but used far less.
If what you’re looking for is a fun printer for fun activities, the Canon Selphy CP1500 has that down. But if you need more prints than the fun postcard or ten, we’d look at something larger and dedicated. It’ll just be better on your budget in the end.
