Canon Selphy ES-1 (warning and rant)

desantnik

desantnik

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At the WTCC meet I saw Canon demo'ing their Selphy dye-sub photo printers. I was quite impressed, the helpful chap even printed a couple of my pics from the day and they looked quite good.

So came home and ordered myself a cheap(ish) ES-1 from the interweb.

Printed a couple, looked fine (well, as fine as a 6x4 would do)...

Then I noticed that with an extremely rare (for me) perfectly framed shot I was loosing some of the picture.

Carefully examaning the Canon "Easy photo print" software it was indeed showing me a nice red line around my pic indicating printable area.

Spoke to Canon's helpdesk (who are as useful as a chocolate teapot btw - I have never used them before..) and they told me (predicatably) that it was "my software" and to either print direct from my camera or via the flash card reader in the front of the printer.

Tried both, makes b****r all difference.

I am loosing approx 100 pixels from both the left and right edges plus some from the top and bottom - haven't measured but its probably 50 or so.

Makes little odds with anything I get normally, but just occassionally I get something really beautifully 100% framed.

Canon have just now told me its to do with the difference between "6x4" prints from their printer and the native resolution of their EOS cameras.... which is a pile of crap as I have verified that photoshop is perfectly happy to make a 6x4 100% crop of my photo.

I think the problem is that to make it "borderless" it overprints left and right (there are little edges you snap off to make your 6x4 photo). Consequently it crops top and bottom to match too and keep the proportions.

In a nutshell, I'd recommend you avoid these things unless all of your photos you'd want to print have an area you want randomnly cropped off all the sides!!

Thanks Canon :thumbsdown:
 
I think you'll have the same problem with most borderless printers - certainly Epson make no secret of the fact that borderless prints are cropped.
 
Maybe that is the case, but its the reluctance of Canon to admit where the problem lies and trying to blame me that has annoyed me.

Oh and plus nowhere in the documentation nor the sales spiel I had from Canon themselves does it actually tell you this. I'd have thought it at least deserves a * in the features list for a purely trading standards point of view...
 
Thanks very much! I think I might well do that!
 
In order to produce borderless prints you need to have your image 'bleed' off the page or printed area. You couldn't accurately print right up to the very edge of the page without either leaving a slight white line or losing some image, due to slight movment of paper feed etc.

Bleed

Printed area which extends off the trimmed area.

It is not possible to print all the way to the edge of the paper sheet. To achieve this effect it is necessary to print a larger area than is required and then trim the paper down. Typically a designer would allow an extra 3mm of bleed to colour and image areas to allow for a little leeway when trimming
Click to expand...
 
But actually the overlap into the tear off area is about 3mm, fair enough, but even taking into account the overlap there is still a fair amount of the picture not actually even printed ANYWHERE!

And the provided Canon software doesn't allow for shrinking of the image to either allow for the "lost" area or let the user make a decision if they want to risk trying to print up to the edge.

I could increase the canvas size in photoshop, but that's not the idea this was sold to me as - this is supposed to be a simple click n print job...
 
desantnik said:
Maybe that is the case, but its the reluctance of Canon to admit where the problem lies and trying to blame me that has annoyed me.

Oh and plus nowhere in the documentation nor the sales spiel I had from Canon themselves does it actually tell you this. I'd have thought it at least deserves a * in the features list for a purely trading standards point of view...
Click to expand...

what problem? sorry i dont think that canon are not telling people off this and keepinbg it secret

this is a screen dump of canons print propeties pages after i select the "borderless printing" tick box (i presume that canon use the smae software for all their printers)

print.jpg


after you click ok it then gives you a slider to select the amount of extension, thus allowing you to choose the amount of extension required (allowing you to minimise the lost image but getting the best edge finish on the print)


i cant posibly see that this problem would be any different with another manufacturers printer.

a quick question, you do have "shrink to fit" selected rather than "crop to fit" on the printer settings
 
No, the ES-1 has nothing like that.
 
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