The market for small, dedicated photo printers continues to grow and they're not all inkjet devices. The alternative technology is dye-sublimation and AGFAPHOTO's Photo Printer AP2700 uses this system. It's a direct competitor to inkjets from Epson, HP and Lexmark and the Selphy range of dye-sub printers from Canon.

With dye-sublimation, a thermal print head runs the full width of the paper passing through the printer, and melts (to be totally accurate, sublimes) tiny amounts of a wax-based dye from a thin backing film that's coated with alternating bands of cyan, magenta and yellow dye.

The AP2700 is about the size and weight of a large bag of sugar, is decked out in black and silver and is designed as a clamshell. Open the two halves of the printer and you can fit the dye-sub ribbon easily into its feed and take-up rollers. Clip a paper cartridge to the front of the printer, loaded with up to 25 sheets of 15 x 10cm (6 x 4-inch) photo paper to complete the set up.

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Set into the top of the printer's body is a 63mm LCD display. Using this and the small, neat, circular control panel, you can select and print photos from a PictBridge-connected camera or from a memory card in any of the common formats, including SmartMedia. You can also print from a PC or Mac, by connecting it via a USB 2 cable, or use the composite output to connect the printer directly to a TV, for slideshows from camera or card.

Each print must make four passes through the printer during printing, to pick up the three primary colours and a final transparent layer that protects the finished photo. The AP2700 manages to complete a print from a camera in just over 60 seconds and takes around 75 seconds from a PC. The quality is good, though in the samples we produced there was a slight cool-blue overtone.

This printer is available in the UK exclusively from Argos and this is where you have to go to buy the print pack, a £40 consumable comprising enough paper and ribbon for 150 photos. This works out at 27p per print, quite a bit more than the 18p that's typical of today's inkjet photo prints.

Since AGFAPHOTO only supplies enough materials for five prints with the AP2700 and since you have to use a mobile phone-style SIM card which comes in the print pack to activate its contents, there's little you can do to reduce the running cost.

This is a supremely easy-to-use, small-format photo printer. The prints it produces are robust, though not quite as naturally coloured as from the best inkjet machines. Print costs are high compared with inkjet and the machine itself isn't cheap. You've really got to balance the simplicity of its print technique against the costs of running the AP2700.