HiTi Photoprinter in action

We put the HiTi Photoprinter through its paces this morning. The dye sublimation process this printer uses means four passes across the print surface before your picture is ready. Cyan, yellow, magenta and black are laid down in separate printing sweeps, so you'll watch the paper swallowed and ejected by the printer until each colour has been added to the page, a process that takes about a minute.

End results? Not bad at all. We printed photographs taken on a Nikon D70 dSLR and the printouts matched what we'd expect from an analogue 35mm camera and traditional developer. Images benefited from a 'sharpen more' filter in Photoshop to bring out the detail in some areas, and tweaking the brightness and contrast to bring out deeper colours also helped. Provided the source images had good clarity, the printed photos were almost an exact match with our on-screen previews -- no mean feat considering that we haven't colour-calibrated our system. One printout did have an odd bit of emulsion in a critical part of the image which left the photo unusable, but we don't know yet whether this problem will recur.

The quality of the HiTi's prints are a challenge to the high-street developer, but its price is not. With shops like Jessops offering 50 digital photo prints for £4.99, or 10p a print, the £129 cost of the HiTi, plus the cost of its consumables, make it a considerably more expensive choice. - CS

Update: this review is now live here.