Canon Selphy 4000 for Cheap Colour Printing

Selphy Portrait (sorry)

After having watched a video of someone using a portable printer at an expo and producing large, high quality colour prints to order for the folks there I thought I’d investigate the possibility of obtaining a cheap printer to maybe put in a box. Instant camera pictures are all very well, but they are a bit variable in quality, expensive and hard to duplicate. I had a look on “the world’s favourite on-line auction site” and found that I could pick up a used Canon Selphy 4000 for well less than 20 quids. A bit of research convinced me that I could drive it from a Raspberry Pi Zero and even make it into an Apple Airprint device if required. So I bought one.

It arrived today. For giggles I checked to see if there was a Windows 10 driver for it. There wasn’t (boo) but it turns out that the Windows Vista 64 bit drivers you can find here worked fine with my copy of Windows 10 (yay!). The printer I got even had some ribbon and paper with it. The image above doesn’t really do the printer justice. The printed picture is vibrant and really nice to look at. You can get Canon branded film packs delivering 36 images for around 12 quid from Cartridge People. They even sent me a free deck of cards with my first order. Next step is to start designing a case to carry everything around in.