Rating: 
Summary: Now a great buy!
Review: Look at the price, 3 months ago I bough this printer for [a good price]and at that time it was the BEST I could find anywhere! The printer works great but the ribbon and paper is far from cheap! I suggest that you try to buy the paper as (100) pack ...That way it is a bit cheaper. I use the printer with my Nikon digital and makes very good prints, it is too bad that you are limited to 8x10".
Rating:
Summary: Only the best will do.
Review: Nestled upon my desk between a new Brother HP-1440 laser and a recently purchased Epson 960 CD printer, is a three year old Olympus P-400. Fast high quality text print-outs are routed to the laser printer, and the Epson is used for the specialty printing of card stock, CDs, and DVDs, but all photographs are created from the P-400, whether in color or black and white. I originally purchased the P-400 for one simple reason; I wanted the highest quality prints possible of family members and for my wedding video service. The Olympus P-400 has never disappointed my highest expectations. Most of us are familiar with how bubble-jet printers create dotted print-outs, which from a distance may look OK, but when viewed up-close the actual quality is not as good as hoped for. I have used a magnifying glass on print-outs from the P-400, and not only are there no dots, I actually do believe I prefer the P-400 print-outs over normal photographs. The P-400 print quality *is* that good. In my region of the world, film developing businesses on occasion ruin whole rolls of film, and so rather than my investing time and money into developing equipment to ensure quality photos, I can now get the prints I want, the size I want, and the quantity I want at any time I want. The paper used in the P-400 is thick, very similar to normal photographs, and instead of the photographs having a brand name on the back side such as "Kodak", it reads "Olympus". The finished photograph also automatically receives a clear protective high gloss coating that does make the print feel and appear to be a developed photo. Unless a person has considerable experience with photography, they will not be able to tell the difference between a regular photo and one printed from the P-400. The actual cost per print-out is around $2.00 (paper and ribbon costs combined), which is not bad at all for an 8x10 or four 4x5 photographs. Advertised life of prints is about the same as regular photographs, around 50 years or more, which is far better than just a year or two with bubble-jet printers. Changing the ribbon and paper is fast, clean, and very easy. Software installation is also quick and uncomplicated. The user friendly printer actually is a 'plug and play'. Though the P-400 has a normal printer parallel port, I highly recommend only using the USB port. The time required to transfer data from the computer to the printer usually only takes several seconds per photograph while using the USB, but it may take minutes through the LPT1 cable. With about two minutes from clicking "print" to receiving a finished 8x10 photograph, the speed is more than pleasing. The printer is fast enough and simple enough that I have not yet found a need to use the Smart Card slot nor even any of the other console controls. Through use of most any photo or graphics program, print-outs are as easy as 'view and print'. The only problem I have encountered was when the printer was new and the plastic ribbon roll rod would occasionally bind in the ribbon holder slot (caused by too tight of tolerances). I was able to trim off the holder's excess plastic to allow the ribbon to turn more freely, and after speaking to the Olympus technical support describing the problem and remedy (of which they were appreciative for the information), surely the new models will no longer have similar minor problems. Three years ago I paid over one thousand dollars for the P-400 on sale, and I have never regretted the cost. Recently I was able to print-out numerous specially-formatted 8x10 copies of my daughter's college graduation, which if done through a photographer would have cost me more than the price of the printer. Today's prices are very reasonable, enough that my wife has begun saying she wants one for herself. In our high-tech low-cost society, not many items produce true quality results, but the Olympus P-400 is one product that actually does live up to our best expectations. Highly recommended, I know of no better desk-top photo printer than the Olympus P series.
Rating: 
Summary: Let the Buyer Beware
Review: Olympus should take the time to print out these comments and make it a resolution to have engineering, the tech manual writers and customer service become familiar with the problems associated with their product.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommend
Review: Only problem are the print drivers. With free downloadable upgrades through olympus.com, drivers now work well with printer through iphoto (Mac); couldn't get them to perform well with Photoshop. Works well with plug-in camera media cards (best with the smart disks; slower with the sticks -- need PC adapter card for sticks). Color is equally as nice from my 2.1 MP Olympus camera as it is with my 5 MP Sony camera.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent printer
Review: The quality is as good as any photo you ever seen, in combination with my E-10 I am done, forget developing or printing at any photostore. The price per pic is still high, but the convinience makes it worth.
My only complain is having not having a Linux driver ! I am stuck having to send my pictures to windows before printing..
Rating:
Summary: Olympus P400
Review: The technical detail: a. The printer may be operated as a standalone product independant of a computer. It contains slots for both SmartMedia cards and compact flash PC card adaptors so you don't have to have a computer connected to the printer to use it. The printer has its own small LCD display which can be used in lieu of a computer interface to help you select pictures off your cards for printing and the printer also has a rather sophisticated built in capability to format the final product. b. The printer has both a parallel port and a USB port for computer connection and is compatible with both PCs and MACs. Configuration software is included on CD for both types of machines. No computer cables are included and will cost you about $20 at your local computer store. c. If connected to a computer, the printer is used to provide printed output for whatever photo editing software you already own. No computer photo editing software is included with the package. d. Documentation is complete and voluminous. However, the technical document giving all the nitty gritty is provided as a computer PDF file readable by Adobe Acrobat software (supplied in multiple languages) and is not provided hardcopy. If you are buying this printer to use as a standalone device without a computer, this puts you at somewhat of a disadvantage. e. The starter kit of paper and printer ribbon is adequate to print only five (5) 8x10" prints so you will want to purchase paper and ribbon with the printer. f. Printing supplies (paper and ribbon) are expensive, costing almost $2 per 8x10" print. The Subjective data: The final print produced is 314x314 dots per inch and looks incredible. I have standard 8x10" Kodak prints produced from my digital photos that do not look nearly as good. Unless you are going to take your digital data to a custom printing specialist and stand over his shoulder, you will not be able to obtain a print better than this printer will give you. Recently, I was trying to restore an old 8x10" photo and scanned it into my computer at the highest resolution possible, edited it in Adobe Photoshop, and wound up with a wonderful restoration. By that time the digital image was up to 58MB size. I asked Kodak to print it, and they did. However, their system couldn't handle the large file size and compressed it to slightly over 2MB. Their final print was acceptable but a lot of the detail and my work was lost because of the compression. My computer fed the entire 58MB file to this printer and it produced a superb picture that made the Kodak image look like a childs effort in comparison. I don't know of any printer today that has comperable capability to the Olympus P400.
Rating:
Summary: AWESOME
Review: This is an amazing printer. Not too slow for color, and professional quality. I've published many photographs with this printer and I'm completely happy. The consumables are expensive but not outrageous. I've had the printer for almost a year and it has been reliable, easy to use, and nearly perfect. For the cost, it is amazing.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent snapshot printer but not for black and white.
Review: This is an excellent personal photo printer but the P-400 cannot put out a black and white image without a color cast. The color cast is usually a faint green even when the monitor-printer have been fully profiled and the image sent contains only grayscale pixels. This is true when the image is sent as either RGB or CMYK file. The printer seems to lay down CMY layers with its K layer to generate neutral tones between black and white and this must be what gives the black and white images their color cast. Still, for photos I share with friends and family its photographic output can't be beat.
Rating:
Summary: I have them all, and this one is the best!
Review: This is the be all and end all to digital photomaking. I have Epsons and HP's and have tried just about every printing solution out there. This one outputs the most amazing prints on very durable paper, that will last a long time. I am a cosmetic dentist, and rely on good, fast prints of before and after photos. This does it all right in my office. The consumables (I call them combustibles) are expensive, but professional output is more costly for sure. My wife is a graphic designer and is thrilled with the results as well. Buy this if you want good, fast, archival prints. Works grat with Wndows XP, incedentally.
Rating:
Summary: Best Affordable Photo Printer on the Market!
Review: This is the best photo printer I have ever used. I bought the Epson 2000 and returned it because the color and quality wasn't good enough. There is not an ink jet printer on the market that can even come close to matching the quality of prints produced by this printer. I am using the Canon D30 and can produce incredible action shots instantly on this printer without even manipulating the picture. I use Adobe Photoshop 6.0 when I manipulate my pictures. Most of the time I copy the pictures back to a SmartMedia or Compact Flash card and print them from the card. This way I'm not tying up most of the computer's memory and can work on another photo project at the same time. The one thing that I have found is when I copy the picture to a card, the printer only recognizes jpeg files from the PC not the Mac.
| 
