Canon Selphy DS810 review

The DS810 sits at the top end of Canon's mini lab range, and with good reason. It's the only Selphy to have a pop-up colour LCD, which is essential for easy photo cropping and colour changes.

This screen is bright and clear, and you can use it to access the printer's main highlight: the software interface. Unlike, say, the Lexmark, the layout takes a little mastering, but it's well organised. Four folders sit in the main menu, letting you go to your photo gallery, print area, print studio and toolbox. The print studio is where you'll spend most of your time, offering all the layout options and colour balancing functions.

Where the Lexmark software was a bit sluggish in response, the Canon is much quicker on its toes. A large panel of buttons sits on the top of the printer; you can edit or trim images, change colour settings and improve printout specs with ease.

Print speed, as for all of the printers except the Samsung, is slower than the advertised speed, but is actually still pretty fast in this test at 1 minute and 18 seconds.

Prints come out a bit on the dark side but resolution is fine - much better than the Lexmark and on a par with the Epson. When we tried paper from the other manufacturers we ran into a problem - we got the impression of the printer's paper-feed wheel across the finished image, especially with HP paper. This seems very substandard. Another drawback is the range of memory slots. You will need to buy separate adaptors to access images from some memory cards, like an xD card for example, which is the standard card used on a lot of consumer cameras.

As a side note, if you shop online and try some US stores, you can get this for half the UK retail price we have quoted here.