You know that one friend who always takes great photos but isn’t the best at sharing them? At my last Fourth of July party, I watched him snap a great picture of my fiancée and me, but instead of asking him to share when he had time, I pulled out Liene’s N200 Pro portable photo printer from my bag. I asked to print that photo on the spot and offered to print anything else he wanted.
Within minutes, it felt like half the party had their phones out, ready to print a photo. By the end of the night, nearly everyone went home with a physical memory of that party.
Like many children of the ’90s, I’ve seen no shortage of trends from my youth try to return with the assistance of modern technology. Capturing a moment that you can physically hold will always be more interesting to me than an Instagram shot, and over the last two years, we’ve seen photo printers get smaller, more capable and considerably less expensive.
The team at Liene, makers of photo and sticker printers with a reputation for being easy to use, created something so portable that it weighs less than a pound and is just 1.2 inches thick, making it an easy travel companion.
It doesn’t get much easier to use than this N200 printer. It charges via USB-C, which is convenient. On more than one occasion, while testing this printer, I’ve just connected it to the car charger on the way to a gathering, and that has been enough for 25 prints over more than an hour. Photo paper and ink cartridges are both easy to install and leave very little mess behind, aside from the small edge you tear off each photo as it exits the printer. As long as you have a phone, you can use this printer.
Swapping out the ink catridge doesn’t get much easier than this.
Liene printers use thermal dye sublimation to create images, which means every print is done in layers. You’ll see the photo paper move in and out of the machine a couple of times with each print as it applies yellow, magenta and blue ink to create the image before it gets a final lamination and exits the printer. This whole process takes just under 90 seconds, and the image quality is surprisingly good for a 3×2 printed image. And because the sheets Liene sells for this printer are also stickers, you can easily peel off the backing and stick the picture to whatever you want.
If you want to quickly go from your camera roll to printing, Liene’s app makes that pretty effortless. But if you want to have some fun, you’ll find loads of personalization options. If you want to take photos through the app using old-school camera filters, it’s right on the home screen. Want a border around the photo? Too easy, there are dozens of options that update constantly to reflect current holidays and sporting events.
The only part of the app I didn’t use too often was the collage function, but only because a 3×2 image is already pretty small and making it smaller wasn’t usually what friends around me would ask for.
The photo paper slot is well hidden, but no less easy to access.
The $100 version of this printer includes 50 sheets of sticker paper and five ink cartridges. There’s an $89 version that comes with 10 sheets of sticker paper and one ink cartridge, but you’re immediately spending more the moment you need more paper or ink because a new box of paper and ink is $25. This also means that each print comes out to about 50 cents, which is slightly less than the 65 cents per print average from competitors like Fujifilm and Canon.
What Liene created with this printer is a fun conversation starter at a party. Tiny sticker photos aren’t the most practical thing ever, but they’re undeniably fun to make and share at a cost that will work for just about everyone.
If you’re the kind of person who enjoys a good physical picture, and you have friends to share something like this with, there’s a lot to like about this printer.
Read the full article here