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Manual (6)
Canon Selphy ES2’s Beginner’s Guide manual comes in three languages: English, Spanish and French. While the French and Spanish are bundled in a single book, the English manual is its own book. The entire booklet is 31 pages and contains a lot less information than you’d expect; although a little over 32% of the booklet is dedicated to cautions and printer problems, there’s little guidance given to what the printer can do or how to use the features. Three pages are dedicated to the printer’s on-unit functions, but they aren’t clear – they just mention graphically that the printer is capable of printing from a computer via USB or a mobile phone with Bluetooth; not a lot of information in three pages.
Out of the Box (5)
This section earned a lower score because the small printer doesn't come with many accessories. Although the box was neatly and tightly packaged, it contained only the printer, power cord, beginner’s guides in English, French and Spanish, ink and paper tray with a small amount of starter paper already set in the tray. There is no USB cable; you have to supply your own.
Setup (7)
Because there weren’t a lot of parts in the box, there wasn’t a lot to setup. After plugging in the printer, the only thing really left was to put in the paper and ink tray. Although the pritner isn't difficult to set up, the small size and unique shape of the printer meant that we did need to consult the Beginner’s Guide to work out how and where to insert the tray. The entire process took less than five minutes, though.
Drivers and Administration (5)
There isn’t much magic to the driver for this ES2; of the three tabs in the driver window, two have actual preferences and editing tools. The first tab is print settings which lets you change the cartridge – whether you want the printer to use color ink or just black, the number of copies you want printed, and a selection box for whether you’d like to keep the prints borderless.
The second tab is image adjustments, which has three toggled options to adjust the amount of red, green and blue you want presenting in your photographs. It also has three more toggled options for the level of saturation, brightness and contrast you prefer.
The third utilities tab is an empty tab except for one tiny checkbox for whether you want notifications displayed or not.
Software (5)
The Canon ES2 isn’t designed to do anything but produce photographs, so i only comes with basic photo editing software: Zoombrowser (ImageBrowser for Mac users) and Ulead PhotoExpress LE which is for Windows only.
The Ulead PhotoExpress LE is designed for basic editing and to make postcards with an array of different frame patterns and designs. Much of the image editing options are auto options; color enhancing, and brightness and contrast are only available as automatic options that can't be manually tweaked. So you can’t choose to enhance the color to your liking, the software will chose how much to enhance the photograph itself. Ulead PhotoExpress also lets you make postcards, bordered artwork and add text to your photographs. PhotoExpress is definitely child-friendly, if not considerably geared toward children with is colorful and playful border designs.
ZoomBrowser is basically self-explanatory; this software allows you to view and make simple edits to your photographs. The problem with this software is editing can be a pain. Although it already provides very general editing options, it only allows you to make one edit at a time; you select your photograph, select edit and select which edit you’d like to make (trim, sharpen and so on). A new window opens with the photograph you want to edit with that one editing option you chose, that’s it. So if you wanted to make several changes to that photograph, you’d have to re-open it and go through all over again, one edit at a time.
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