Canon embraces Instagram with a portable printer for retro-pics

Most of us love taking photos on our smartphones, and with photographic social networking services like Instagram, VSCO, and Facebook, many of us are finding outlets to send our social creativity, but printing just doesn’t happen anymore, and Canon wants to change that.

Call it the return of the portable printer, because that’s more or less what it is, as Canon’s Selphy brand is brought back to life with a portable printer made for your phone or tablet.

Supporting WiFi printing, the new Selphy printer — as opposed to one of the old Selphy printers — can receive images from an iPhone, iPad, Windows RT, or Android device and print out the photos to either 6×4 print for regular postcard shots or even some square sticker paper (KC-18IS) for the square shots taken over Instagram and similarly retro systems.

While Canon Australia hasn’t given much information about the printer, we’re assuming it works the same way as other small photo printers, relying small-scale dye sublimation technology to provide photos with 100 year ink life and an amount of ink relative to the to the photos you’re printing, so if you buy a 20 pack of stickers, you get 20 pictures.

The new printer, Canon’s Selphy CP910, is available now at stores everywhere, and while Canon won’t give us a price due to a policy put in place years ago, we don’t anticipate it’ll cost much more than $100.