Page one of the driver has options for Paper size (Post card, 3.5x5", Small), border or borderless, portrait or landscape orientation, rotate 180°, # of copies, enlarge / reduce and enable the print preview feature.

Page two has options for Color reproduction / Picture quality (Off, Auto Fine Print3, ICM), enable ExifPrint (if the image has ExifPrint info embedded in it) and manually adjust the RGB colorchannels and image sharpness.

If you enabled the Print Preview option on the page one of the driver then you will see this preview page before the printing begins.

During the printing process you will see this animated "gauge" showing each of the four passes the paper makes through the printer.

PictureGear Studio

Sony PictureGear Studio consists of five main parts: Import Photos to transfer images and movies from the camera. Binder lets you add comments and organize information. PhotoCollection lets you organize and manage the imported photos. PhotoAlbum is for creating albums of your photos and PrintStudio is for printing them as regular prints, post cards, labels, cards and mini-calendars.

You can view, crop, rotate and adjust images and then make prints, put together entire printed photo albums or make smaller images for email or web use.

Click to see the camera and photo information contained in the image and stored at the time of capture.

It has tools to auto correct or manually adjust the brightness, contrast, luminance, gamma or sharpness and remove red-eye or to rotate portrait images or trim unwanted portions of the photo.

And a nice fully-featured print function complete with preview image.

Steve's Conclusion

The DPP-FP50 is a fully-featured, compact, personal dye sublimation photo printer that lacks only a preview LCD. It offers direct printing from any PictBridge compatible camera or the most popular memory cards and can be connected to a TV set for preview and image selection. It can also be plugged into your Windows 98SE, Me, 2000 or XP PC (sorry, no Mac OS X support) and used like any other photo printer. It directly reads from Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, CompactFlash Type I and II, SD cards and IBM/Hitachi Microdrives. Through the use of adapters it can also read from Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Duo PRO cards, xD-Picture Cards and SmartMedia cards.

The print quality is the equal of conventional, wet-processed photo prints and thanks to its protective overcoat, just as UV resistant and durable. The printing process is totally dry, no leaky ink cartridges to change, just a ribbon cartridge and the special paper that it prints on. Dye-sub printers make four passes on the paper, three to lay down the primary colors (magenta, cyan and yellow) and the fourth pass puts a protective overcoat on the print.

The DPP-FP50 sells for about $200-250 and the ribbon and paper kit delivers 4 x 6" postcard size prints for as low as $0.50 each when you use the 80-sheet print packs. The print speed (approx. 60 seconds) is faster than many other 4 x 6" dye-sub printers. The included PictureGear Studio makes it easy to organize and print your photos and also lets you create mini-photo calendars, postcards and other special prints. Setup and use is very simple and we're sure that the FP50 will please those that want a high-quality home printer to make their own jumbo size color prints.