You know that one friend who always takes great photos but isn’t the best at sharing? At my last Fourth of July party, I watched her take a beautiful picture of my fiancee and I, but instead of asking her to share it when she had time, I walked out. Liene’s N200 Pro portable photo printer in my bag. I offered to print that picture right away and offered to print anything else he wanted.
Within minutes, it sounded like part of the party had their phones out, ready to print a photo. At the end of the night, almost everyone went home with a real memory of that party.
Like many children of the ’90s, I see no shortage of trends from my youth trying to make a comeback with the help of modern technology. Capturing a moment you can’t physically capture will always be more interesting to me than an Instagram photo, and over the past two years, we’ve seen photo printers become smaller, more efficient and less expensive.
The team at Liene, photo makers and sticker printers which has a reputation for being easy to usecreated something so portable that it weighs less than a pound and is 1.2 inches thick, making it an easy travel companion.
It doesn’t get much easier to use than this N200 printer. It charges via USB-C, which is convenient. On more than one occasion, while testing this printer, I just plugged it into a car charger on the way to a rally, and that was enough for 25 prints over an hour. Photo paper and ink cartridges are both easy to load and leave very little waste behind, aside from the small edge that cuts through each image as it exits the printer. As long as you have a phone, you can use this printer.
Replacing an ink cartridge isn’t much easier than this.
Liene’s printers use thermal dye sublimation to create images, which means all printing is done in layers. You’ll see the photo paper go in and out of the machine several times with each print as it uses the yellow, magenta and blue inks to create the image before it gets its final sheen and exits the printer. The whole process takes less than 90 seconds, and the image quality is surprisingly good for a 3×2 printed image. And because the sheets that Liene sells for this printer are also stickers, you can easily peel off the side and stick the image on anything you want.
If you want to quickly go from your camera roll to print, Liene’s app makes that effortless. But if you want to have fun, you’ll find plenty of customization options. If you want to take photos with the app using old school camera filters, on the home screen. Want a border around the photo? It’s very simple, there are many options that are updated regularly to reflect the current holidays and sporting events.
The only part of the app I didn’t use very often was the collage function, but because a 3×2 image is already too small and making it smaller was usually not something my friends around me would ask for.
The photo paper slot is well hidden, but not easy to access.
I $100 version of this printer includes 50 sheets of adhesive paper and five ink cartridges. There is the $89 version that comes with 10 sheets of sticker paper and one ink cartridge, but you quickly spend a lot of time needing more paper or ink because a new box of paper and ink is $25. This also means that each print comes out to about 50 cents, which is slightly less than the 65 cents per print average from competitors like Fujifilm and Canon.
Liene’s creations with this printable are a fun conversation starter at a party. Sticker thumbnails aren’t realistic, but they’re definitely fun to make and share at a price that will work for just about anyone.
If you’re the type of person who enjoys a good body image, and you have friends to share something like this with, there’s a lot to like about this printer.