Installation and Operation:
Considering that this printer does not connect to a computer, the typical step of installing drivers and printing applications is skipped. The printer is simply turned on, and after a warm up period of about two to three minutes, it is ready to get down to business. The below left image shows the main screen where the arrow buttons can be used to scroll through the five main options ("View & Print", "Slide Show", "Setup", "Print All/Index", "Save/Copy"), and the check mark button is used to make a selection. Navigating to the "Setup" menu will provide a variety of settings that can be custom configured, and the below right image shows the screen where a Bluetooth adapter can be installed.
The image below shows a USB flash drive connected to the P450, and the device is in the process of printing two images. Note that the screen shows three minutes and twenty three seconds remaining on this image... Not particularly quick! I created prints via USB flash drive, CompactFlash card, PictBridge, and CD, and although they all worked perfectly, they were all equally slow. While printing from any source other than PictBridge, the 2.4" LCD provides a decent quality preview of the images, and allow you to select the image (or batch of images) you would like to print. While using PictBridge, the camera's LCD screen took control of the printing function.
The images below show some sample prints created on the P450, including a daylight outdoor panoramic shot, a lower light outdoor close up shot, and an indoor extreme close up shot. I am no photography expert, but even my point and click shots were able to be printed in high quality with zero fussing or adjustments made to the images or printer. The print quality exceeded my expectations, and even upon close scrutiny, the images looked as good (or better) than most other prints I have made on more expensive HP and Epson photo printers.
The next feature tested was to write a CD with the contents of a USB flash drive. The below left image indicates that I intended to copy 86 images from the flash drive to the blank CD, and what is not shown is that the total file size was roughly 54MB. The below right image shows the CD writing at about the half way point, and that it estimates there are ten minutes and eight seconds remaining. Much like the warm up time and printing speed, the P450 seems very slow at writing CDs. Considering 54MB is about 7% of a 750MB CD's capacity, the 20+ minutes it took to burn seems excessive. Some rough math suggests that a full CD would therefore take several hours to complete!
The CD was burned with image files placed on the USB flash drive in a couple different folders and with various file naming conventions. When the finished CD was accessed from a computer, all files had been moved to one folder and all of them had been renamed to use a new sequential naming convention.
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