Product ReviewsPrinters
To say the HiTi Photo Printer 7730PS is just a 301dpi colour, four-pass, thermal-diffusion printer doesn't really do it justice. This is one of those products whose designers, in creating a colour printer, went for a spin down 'the road less travelled', and ended up going somewhere new. If you're used to HP, Canon, Epson and the like, the 730PS is idiosyncratic, but charmingly so - something that's immediately obvious from the highly colourful setup guide: two glossy A3 pages in a multi-lingual booklet, clearly translated from Chinese. But who needs a manual? Open the box, take out the printer, plug in the LCD handset cable, the power cable, open a media pack, drop in the printer ribbon, fill the tray with paper, and you're ready to print straight from one of seven standard digital photo media types - Compact Flash, Smart Media, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital, Microdrive, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro - using the built-in card reader. No Mac required: you can do everything via the handset. The handset is attached to the printer via a flexible cable, and comes with an iPod-like control pad and a small but serviceable colour LCD. When not connected to your Mac, the LCD displays a simple, eight-option visual menu, allowing you to print, crop, enlarge, or produce a contact sheet of your photos. Just select the image(s) you want from the eight-at-a-time mini-preview. Your five-year-old will have no trouble working out what goes where, and it's all very intuitive. To print from your Mac, just plug-in a USB cable, and run the installer. The Mac drivers weren't on the CD we were sent, but the latest drivers can be downloaded from HiTi's straightforward website. Once installed you can print from any standard Mac application, including, most importantly, iPhoto. Why pay £280 for a 301dpi printer when you can get an inkjet, well, inside a box of Cornflakes? Four
Second, both media and the dye ribbon are included in media packs. So when you buy a media pack, you know you'll have exactly enough materials for the job, and also you can calculate an exact cost per copy, which is something that can be difficult with inkjet refills. HiTi currently provides three standard photography-size options for the 730PS, which work out at 30p per 4 x 6, 50p per 5 x 7, 70p for 6 x 8. Third, it offers true edge-to-edge printing - printing is full width, and the media is top and tailed with neatly perforated edges that snap off with a satisfying click. Fourth, yes, it's a four-pass printer, but that's cyan, magenta, yellow and overlay. The overlay layer is a transparent, waterproof layer that HiTi claims protects against UV and fingerprints. As far as the software is concerned, this layer is just another colour to be printed, so the OS X driver software allows you to print watermarks, or matt effects over your images. If all that weren't enough, it's fast. From clicking print to final output took just 90 seconds for a 6 x 8 print from iPhoto on our 867MHz G4 PowerBook, and smaller sizes are proportionately faster. Watching the image build up on the paper is entertaining in itself. The design is full of well-thought-out touches - the clip-lock on the paper tray, the ease of switching between media, and the fact that the controls are LCD based and on a flexible cable, so no more grovelling around if you want to put the printer out of the way and only want manual access occasionally. It's a consumer item, and styled accordingly. For small print shops, or academic institutions, its fixed price and fast output make it a must-have. For someone who just wants to print photos of the kids, in terms of print quality and ease of use, the 730PS will certainly round off the digital hub experience. Apple should certainly offer it from its online store. Skirting the edges of cliche, it's the sort of product that, if only they made printers, would make Ronseal proud. By Richard Dyce |
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