Olympus Camedia P-400 Digital Color Photo Printer

I have owned this printer for nearly two years. It has been trouble-free and has given me hundreds of beautiful pictures that have the look and feel of high-quality photo prints. I use Photoshop Elements to clean-up my images and to size them for printing. Photoshop elements allows me to place multiple images on a full sheet of paper. I recently showed some travel photos to a friend. He said, "I've seen digital pictures before but never any that looked this beautiful! What kind of a camera do you have?" I told him that it wasn't the camera, it was the printer. The printer, itself, is not hard to set up and use. At first , you must pay attention to how you load the ribbon, but if you look carefully at the instructions, you will be fine. A negative review mentions the micro lesions on the surface of the prints. It is true that there are a few extremely fine scratches on the plastic surface of each page . However, you will never notice them unless you take them to a window and tilt the picture around to catch the light just so. In normal viewing, you will never know they are there. And they are only on the clear, plastic coating that covers the pigments on the paper. (The paper makes four passes over the thermal head. Three passes put the color on, the fourth applies a protective coating of clear plastic.) The drawback to this printer is that it will not print larger than 8X10, and not quite a true 8X10 at that. Personally, that has never bothered me. I don't do a lot of 8X10's, and when I do, I put a border around the print, put it in a frame and it's fine. The quality of the pictures continually amazes everyone I show them to. I think this is a great photo printer.

This printer does not come with any type of drivers. After receiving the printer, we discovered the Windows 7 operating system does not have drivers for this printer. There are some available on-line that are suppose work with Windows XP or Windows 2000. So far, my husband has not been able to get the drivers to work (he is a retired computer geek, so has alot of expertise). We asked for a refund, but the company refused because I choose the reason that the printer was defective or did not work. From my point of view, this printer does not work on the system I require so it is defective. Anyway, we made a mistake buying this printer. Save your money and do not purchase this printer. If you have a Mac system, you will also have issues with the drivers for this printer unless you are running old operating systems.

Finally a low cost home solution to color photography. The P-400 is now priced at 1/3 of its original introduction price. Absolutely no comparison to any inkjet printer. Photos printed on inkjets fade over time. The P-400 sub dye process coats the photo with a fourth lamination layer that prevents fading. The cost of the supplies are inexpesive when you consider you can make your own 8X10 in about 2 minutes for about $1.60. Forget about the price of the printer. A couple of hundred sheets through it and you'll have more invested in the supplies than the printer itself. I recently returned from Hawaii and made a photo album with multiple different sized printed on a single page. Then bound all the pages with a spiral and use it as my custom album. Much nicer than any photo album or insert and everyone compliments me on it. I just wish that they would make an adapter to accept the Xd card type as I have to print through my lasptop. This is a beautiful home toy you'll have lots of fun with. And remember: Your not paying thousands for a photo-lab but you get vitually the same results. BUY IT!

Unfortunately, this machine does not work yet. Rather than hassle the return centers and all that, I am electing to take it to Olympus, down the street from me, and pay to have it fixed. Hopefully I can then update this review. Olympus claims the printer works, but it will not for me. I have a Mac, so probably that is the problem. It is gathering dust as we speak, and I will eventually put it in the dumpster.

In December, after some research, I purchased an Olympus P-400 printer and a SONY digital camera (the Cybershot DSC-S85). I decided on the SONY because it had a number of better features. However, I knew about the compatability question of the memory stick being used with the Olympus P-400 printer. Olympus in its literature says it will work and SONY and others make PC card adapters to interface between the two. Contrary to what a previous reviewer said (Michael E. Brown, Sept. 13, 2001) the combination does work and, in fact it works wonderfully!! After purchasing a SONY PC Card Adapter and placing the MSA64A Memory Stick in it(and viewing it on the P-400 LCD screen!!), I was able to print out fantastic prints in minutes. Furthermore, my son-in-law who had called a photo shop and both manufacturers support lines was told that the combination would not work also!! It is a dynamite combination....it works great, with no gliches or drawbacks and I just wanted to clear up any misinformation that may be out there.

I purchased the printer many years ago and loved the photographs that it produced. It was a fantastic printer that my wife also used to print family and vacation photos for her scrapbooking. Sadly, we eventually wore the printer out, did not replace it and have not had a color printer since. I tried other photo paper but found that the Olympus paper worked best (for me).