Picture quality and durability

It's a little late to be reviewing this product but here goes anyway. I've owned my P400 for about four years now possibly longer. I've printed close to 500 pages with it and it has never hiccupped, not once. It is an extremely reliable, photo only printer that unfortunately has been discontinued by Olympus. The beauty of that fact is that you can probably pick one up at an inexpensive price on Ebay or Craigslist. Olympus still provides the paper and the dyesub ribbons and hopefully will for a long, long time. The best feature is the picture quality and durability. When it prints the page makes four passes through the printer laying down yellow, magenta, and cyan. The last pass applies a bulletproof clear coat to the picture making it archival and oblivious to the occasional water spot or finger print. All in all this is an awesome photo printer.

Ease of use, true color, and the "feel."

Olympus cusotmer service sucks. They state a 48 hour turnaround on thier website for questions. It took a week.

I purchased this printer to augment my event sales business. I find the printer to be outstanding in terms of ease of use, color rendition, and overall quality. Yes, the media is expensive, but when you can easily turn around and sell the product for $15-20 per sheet, the cost is not horrible. Compared to the color on inkjects, this is outstanding. These prints look and feel like real photographs.

Similar Products Used:

Epson 1270 Olympus P-300

speed, price, quality, ease of use and portability (compared to the Kodak)

no mac OSX drivers yet, odd paper size and no paper finish options

Simply the best value for money dye sub photo quaity printer on the market. I am an onsite event photog and this printer rocks, it never misses a beat and there is no waste, you press print and 90 saconds later; money in my pocket. Customers are blown away at the speed and quality finish, and all for one fifth the price of the Kodak equivilant.

Similar Products Used:

most

When the P-400 works it produces excellent pictures but getting only a 10% yield makes it too expensive to use in a business.

Very expensive to use.

I purchased a P-400 printer for my Photography Business in June 2001. It has been a total failure because it inserts radom color lines in about 90% of the prints that I produce. I have email the company, I have sent the unit back, and Olympus did nothing to fix the problem. I have purchased 6 new ribbons and paper to go with it and the unit has the same problem from ribbon to ribbon. Olympus seems totally indifferent and at present it looks like I am out $900.00 and no good way to solve the problem.

Customer Service

The Olympus customer service takes one to two weeks to answer email questions and when they answer the information is of no value. Their phone service seems only interested in getting you off the

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I have an Hp 1220C that produces almost the same quality and works every time.

Image Quality
Print Speed (using USB)
Flexibility

Cost of paper and ribbons

Incredible printer. I am usually a very tough critic, but this printer is amazing.

The color depth and saturation is astounding. I print mostly full sheet photos (A4 paper). The only drawback is that there is a 1/2 inch margin that I can't seem to reduce, but the image is excellent.

Forget about DPI resolution. Although this printer only rates at 314 DPI, the image sharpness is everything you could ask for. I printed a full sheet photo of a peacock and you can see details of each individual feather.

The ribbons and paper are expensive. The ribbon will only print 50 full sheets and costs over $40. The paper is over $1.00 per sheet. Therefore, your total cost (not including the printer itself) is about $2.00/full sheet. Add film cost, processing cost and the cost of the equipment and you have very expensive prints. However, I think it was money well spent. These prints are suitable for framing and sale.

The printer will support both parallel and USB connections. You will definitely want to use USB. I originally set the printer up as parallel and it would take 20 minutes to print. I switched over to USB and it will print from Photoshop in 90 seconds.

You can also print two prints or four prints to page. I don't do this often, so I can't speak to the ease of setting that up.

Bottom line: Get it if you can afford it and want production quality prints.

Customer Service

Good technical support

Similar Products Used:

Various Epson photo printers

Excellent color; able to print from compact flash and smartmedia as well as microdrive; small footprint; no computer needed; can use either USB or serial connection if you use a computer; various sizes of paper; relatively easy to use; professional looking prints; speed of printing.

None

This is a terrific printer that will give an amateur the ability to make prints that look like real pictures. All at a resonable price.

Customer Service

Not used but excellent web support available.

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HP2500
HP2000
Epsom 1270

Great resolution, color range, and saturation. Prints are indistinguishable from halide prints.

Primitive printer driver (Mac). Cumbersome film installation. Maximum print size A4. Costly film, and paper (only available from Olympus). Only glossy paper available.
Costly as compared to ink jet printers.
Unknown print life.

Overall, an excellent product. Prints are truly photographic quality. Would like to see other paper finishes available. Would like to see more flexible printer drivers made available (print multiple images on single sheet).

Customer Service

Unknown.

Similar Products Used:

Epson 800, 1200, 740.
HP 1200

Quality, speed

Price, paper requirements

This printer produces disturbingly good photos -- I mean spectacular. I've seen excellent prints from my PhotoSmart and my wife's Epson, but the P-400's are a step above.

Will most people appreciate the difference? Probably not; ink jet technology is darned good. But for people who *do* notice, even taking a magnifying lens to the P-400's prints will make you wonder if they came from a PC.

On the downside, the P-400 uses A4 size paper, not the U.S. standard 8.5 x 11. That means you have to buy Olympus's supplies, period. That's also because it's a dye-sub printer, so substituting generic photo paper (even of the correct size) is a no-no.

Media cost for using it run about $50 US for an ink roll (yes, roll), and about $25 US for 25 sheets of paper. That means each 8x10 (or, rather, 7.25 x 10) costs about $2.00 US. Better than any place I've ever seen.

Customer Service

Not needed

Similar Products Used:

HP PhotoSmart, various Epson Stylus Photos