Dye-sublimation printers have always occupied a relatively small niche in the digital photo printer marketplace. The undeniable beauty of their true continuous-tone prints has been offset by the printers' painfully high price tags. The few models available for under $1,000 could only make small prints (typically about 3 x 5"), and the ones that could make 8 x 10" prints cost $3,000 or more. Olympus has changed all that with their new P-400, a high-quality dye-sub printer able to make prints up to 7.25 x 10" and priced at $999. We think it will appeal to many quality-conscious digital photographers. 

The inkjet printers most of us are familiar with create the illusion of continuous color and tonal gradation by laying down a complicated pattern of thousands or millions of separate cyan, magenta, and yellow ink droplets of uniform intensity. 

Dye-sublimation printers, on the other hand, use three separate passes of a thermal print head to diffuse a tiny gas cloud of cyan, magenta, and yellow dye from a ribbon onto the printing paper at each pixel location. This process lets the printer vary the intensity of each primary color from pixel to pixel and also causes the dyes to physically mix together. The result is a true continuous-tone color print. 

The benefits of the dye-sublimation process are clearly visible in the P-400's prints. They have a rich, natural, smooth color quality that can't quite be matched by even the best inkjets currently available. (Though some of the latter, depending on the image being printed, sometimes come impressively close.) The P-400 does especially well with skin tones and in areas of an image where gradual and subtle changes in color and tonality occur. We were also pleased with the excellent sharpness and detail of our test prints. (We should note that you can't make meaningful comparisons between dye-sub and inkjet resolution figures. A good 300-dpi dye-sub will usually make smoother, more detailed prints than inkjets rated at 1,000-dpi or more.) 

Our one significant complaint is that sharply defined lines, especially curved ones, sometimes print with a noticeable jaggyness. This problem is greatly reduced if you set a picture's image resolution to exactly 314-dpi—no higher, no lower—but the printer's driver software should do a better job of resampling. 

Olympus says the P-400's prints should last about 15-20 years before showing any color fading. That figure is valid for more-or-less standard exhibition conditions -- i.e. framed behind UV-protective glass, kept out of direct sunlight, and protected from aerosols, toxic gasses, smoke, diesel fumes, petrochemical clouds, volcanic ash, nuclear fallout, or similar hazards. 

You can connect the P-400 to a Mac or PC via USB. It'll also work with a PC's parallel port, but neither USB nor parallel cables ship with the printer. 

At present, only Olympus offers paper and dye ribbon for the P-400. The paper costs a dollar per A4 sheet, and you use 90 cents worth of ribbon every time you make a print regardless of the actual printed size of the image. 

The P-400's driver software includes settings for sharpening and color adjustment and the option to manage color with ICC profiles. (Olympus does not provide an ICC profile with the printer.) The default color adjustment settings on our unit produced color prints that were a bit too red/orange, but it was relatively easy to find a single setting that corrected for that tendency in most of our images. (Plus one unit on the blue gamma slider, for you curious types.) We feel, however, that the scale of adjustment on the various color settings is a bit too coarse; for example, moving the red brightness slider by only one unit produces a fairly dramatic change in the print.

It's probably unfair of us to ask anything different from a printer with no black dye, but we were mildly disappointed that we couldn't get the P-400 to produce consistently neutral grays in our black and white photos. (We could get bluish-gray or greenish-gray but not grayish-gray.) Still, the bluish-gray prints weren't too far from neutral and had a beautiful, very smooth tonality. 

One thing that's not disappointing is the P-400's speed; it'll print a 20 megabyte file in 90 seconds (excluding data compilation time, which varies with your computer.)

Like many newer printers, the P-400 can work without a computer, making prints directly from SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards. Using a 16-level grayscale LCD mounted on the P-400's top panel, you can select which pictures to print, crop them, rotate them, attach a background image or a border to each one, adjust color and sharpness, gang six photos onto one sheet of paper, print a thumbnail index sheet, and more. It's an admirably complete set of features, but navigating the endless menus necessary to accomplish these tasks is a painful chore that we don't think many people will want to endure. Further, many images are impossible to identify on the grayscale LCD. 

Overall, we think the P-400 fits a worthwhile niche. Though more expensive than a good inkjet, it produces a richer, smoother color print with most images. On the other side of the coin, you can find dye-subs that make better prints, but you have to spend 3 to 5 times as much to own one.