Canon Selphy ES3 or HP PhotoSmart A646, which is better?

Printing companies compete with each other by offering better products. Better means can mean products with more features or improved features. Before they competed before increasing the printing speed or improving the printing resolutions. Today, they explore different types of printers such as large format printers and professional photo printers. With everything going portable, it stands to reason that portable photo printers are going as well. In this article, we will discuss which is the best portable photo printer, Canon or HP. For comparison, we’ll talk about their latest portable photo printer, the Canon Selphy ES3 and the HP PhotoSmart A646.

print resolution
It is important that a portable photo printer has a very good print resolution. Although both printers are designed to print photos, the HP printer has a higher print resolution compared to the Canon printers. With a resolution of 4800 x 1200 dots per inch, it’s much better than 300 dpi. You can expect much clearer photos from HP.

print speed
Both printers are relatively fast in the sense that they can print a borderless 4″ x 6″ photo in less than a minute. However, if you go into details, HP photo printer is much faster compared to Canon printers. The HP printer can finish a photo in 28 seconds. Canon’s printer can finish one in 55 seconds. Relatively, HP can print twice as fast as Canon. This doesn’t matter much if you’re just printing a few photos. However, if you want to print a lot of photos, then HP’s portable photo printer is the way to go.

interfaces
Since both are the latest photo printers, we can expect both to be able to interface with different devices. In this aspect, both are on a par. Both printers are capable of interfacing with Bluetooth-enabled devices. Both have USB ports where you can connect to your computer. This port can also be used to interface with PictBridge-enabled cameras. If you have a PictBridge-enabled camera, then you don’t need to bring a computer as well. You can simply take photos and print them directly from your cameras.

OS Compatibility
When it comes to operating systems, both printers are capable of supporting multiple operating systems namely: Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS. However, HP has the advantage of being compatible with Windows 7, which is the latest Windows operating system. If you don’t use Windows 7, are already comfortable using it, and don’t see yourself upgrading, then there should be no problem.

portability
Both printers sport a handle. This makes it easy to manually transport both units. Though in terms of weight, Canon’s printer weighs almost twice as much as HP’s.

All in all, HP leads the way in most of the mentioned features. The HP PhotoSmart A646 prints faster. It has a higher print resolution and is capable of interfacing with Windows 7 in addition to the other operating systems.