Like Canon in Asia, Sony is a printer manufacturer that plays it both ways (it makes cameras, too). But its offerings are painfully small, literally. Besides the small footprint (180 x 66 x 137mm), there are just four dye sublimation models currently out on the market.

Pros

At 1.2kg, the DPP-FP90 is no heavyweight, but it's not light on features, either. For one, Sony acknowledges there's a world outside the Memory Stick (the Japanese firm's flash storage utopia). The previous FP55 only clicked with Memory Stick and SD.

The FP90 supports a fat range of cards (Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick, SD, miniSD and CF) for its direct media slots, so it should pair well with most of this season's camera models since most cams support SD at a minimum.

Generally, printers that are built to function as standalone printing devices tend to need a display. The FP90 has a 3.6-inch LCD screen. And it's not used for viewing your pretty mug alone. You can edit and touchup pictures with it, but don't expect Photoshop quality since it is virtually pointless to color manage the tiny LCD screen.

Adjustment options include brightness, saturation and sharpness levels as well as color filters. If you can't quite deal with the screen size, there's also an auto touchup feature.

If you don't have a PC image browser, the FP90 is bundled with the Picture Motion Browser which can organize pictures by calendar priority and assign print duties to the FP90.

Sony promises a print speed of 50 seconds for a 4R photo which is very decent for a dye-sub printer.

Cons

Too bad there's no onboard Bluetooth support, so you can't beam pictures to the printer from a mobile phone (we mean high megapixel models). But there're the DPOF and PicBridge options which makes the FP90 good for three ways of connectivity. In the case of printers, three's not a crowd.

At S$349, it's also not the cheapest dye-sub on the market. Photo-capable inkjet AIOs can go for less if you are not particularly picky about portability or quality.

Bottomline

It's not value-for-money, but for a printer that's easy to operate and tote around, the FP90 is certainly worth a look.