Olympus P-400 Dye-Sublimation Printer: Fast, near photo-lab quality printing
Written: Jun 15 '02 (Updated Jun 15 '02)
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Pros: High quality prints, fast for the quality,somewhat portable
Cons: Expensive printer, paper & supplies!
The Bottom Line: I highly recommend the Olympus P-400 if you're looking for a photo printer and have the space for it in both your office and your bank account.
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| jiwhite's Full Review: Olympus P 400 Dye Sublimation Printer |
We've had better computer equipment than the local FBI for a long time and this printer is no exception. My husband and I purchased the Olympus P-400 for use in our consulting business. We primarily use this printer for printing black and white pictures of bank robbery suspects and creating Fraud and Robbery Prevention training materials.
Note: The category title for this printer is misleading because it is a thermal dye sublimation printer, not an ink jet printer.
Cost
We purchased this printer for $999. However, today you can buy it for well under $700. That still puts it into the expensive professional/semi-professional printer price range. Also, all of the supplies associated with this printer are also expensive. Olympus photo paper costs more than $1 per full page, although you can buy it in half and quarter page sizes. A 25 page packet of full page photo paper costs $20 to $30. The ink ribbon for this printer costs around $50 to print 50 pages, the number of pages the outlet tray can hold. Printing is fast for the quality of the prints at approximately 90 seconds per page.
A major disadvantage of this printer is that the supplies are proprietary, meaning you can only buy the paper and ink from Olympus. Don't expect to be able to find a cheap deal on supplies from a third party any time soon. Also, the print doesn't fill the entire page. The size actually covered by printing on a full A4 8.26" X 11.7" page is a maximum of 7.64" X 10" or 2400 X 3200 dots, which can be awkward to fit in an 8" X 10" frame.
Wow!
Why would you want to pay such a high price for a printer and shell out $2 or more per page for printing? The simple answer is the quality of the prints. The continuous-tone, dye sublimation process of using heat to transfer 3 colors of ink and a protective overcoat from the ribbon to the page provides incredible detail - 7.7 Megapixels and 16.7 million (8-bit) colors. The pictures this printer can produce are incredibly detailed. The resolution is 314 DPI, but looks better than ink jet printers at 1200 DPI. If you want to see every shade of green on every blade of grass in your photo, this is the printer for you. The prints at first glance look like they came from a photo lab. A minor issue that we've found is that the overcoat can look a bit streaky from the rollers if you look very closely.
The printer also has a larger number of options than most for providing connectivity. The printer is compatible with both Microsoft Windows (95/98/NT/2000, depending on the printer cable, parallel or USB) and Macintosh (OS 8.6 - 9, USB G3, iMac or later). The front panel accepts SmartMedia and has a PCMCIA PC Card Type II slot (compatible with CompactFlash or Sony Memory Stick cards). If you have fairly new computer or digital camera, you can find a way to get your pictures to this printer.
At over 30 lbs and with dimensions of 16.8" wide X 12.4" high X 10.8" deep, this printer is still fairly portable. It is sturdy enough to bring to a family reunion or corporate event to print high quality pictures for people to take back home or to the office.
Not so great
The front panel of this printer has a small, grayscale LCD screen which, theoretically, enables you to do the following functions: multiple print, album print, index print, postcard, signature stamp function, background template function, frame print function, filter function, date print function, and rotation. However, the screen is so difficult to read that we rarely use these functions. We almost always manipulate the images in a graphic program, Adobe Photoshop, not the front panel controls.
The photo ink cartridge is easily accessible through the front panel, but we've found it a little tricky to install replacements.
Bottom Line
The printing quality of the Olympus P-400 is excellent, near photo lab, but the price is steep. I highly recommend it if you're looking specifically for a dedicated photo printer and have the space for it both in your office and your bank account.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 999
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
jiwhite
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Member: Janine White
Location: Chandler, AZ
Reviews written: 194
Trusted by: 142 members
About Me:
Criminologist turned Software Engineer
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