Canon IVY Mini Photo Printer Review

Over the past few years, we've seen a surge of pocket photo printers that you operate solely from your smartphone or tablet. A few, notably the HP Sprocket Photo Printer and the Lifeprint 2x3 Hyperphoto Printer, have managed top ratings in PCMag reviews. Now, along comes Canon's IVY Mini Photo Printer ($129.99), which, aside from a few set-apart print features, is essentially a "me-too" model

. It prints as well as most of its competitors, and it comes with an easy-to-use app for printing, as well as for cropping and enhancing your photos. In our testing, though, little about the IVY stands out. It's as good a choice as most of its competitors, assuming what you're after are tiny, on-the-fly prints from a mobile device.

The Canon IVY ($99.99 at Amazon) measures 0.7 by 3.2 by 4.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.6 ounces. These measurements are close enough to those of competing models that print the same size photos—such as the Lifeprint 2x3, the HP Sprocket, and the Polaroid Insta-Share ($199.99 at Polaroid) —to be negligible. The big exception in this lot is the Lifeprint 3x4.5, which prints significantly larger photos. It measures 1 by 4.5 by 6.3 inches and weighs 12 ounces. That's about a third again as big as the other printers mentioned here, which specialize in 2-by-3-inch (wallet-size) output.

Canon offers the IVY in three color schemes, all two-tone, with white on top and a pastel shade around the edge and on the bottom. (The choices are Slate Gray, Rose Gold, or Mint Green.) All are pleasant but somewhat unusual-looking colors for a printer.