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Manual/Quick Start Guide (8.00)
The quick start instructions included with the Sony FP90 printer are easy to understand and clearly laid out. The instructions are broken up into two parts: setting up the printer and making a print. Each of these are illustrated with simple black-and-white line drawings. One nice touch is that Sony gives a brief illustrated description of the dye sublimation printing process. Most consumers are more familiar with the inkjet process, so helping them understand how dye sublimation printers work is a thoughtful addition.
Out of the box (7.00)
The Sony Picture Station DPP-FP90 comes packed with a few accessories, including a paper tray, cleaning cartridge, AC adapter and cord, and a CD-ROM with a host of software on it. The printer driver is on the CD along with Picture Motion Browser version 2.0 for Windows. Users can print straight from the box since there is a sample print pack capable of producing 10 prints (dye ribbon cartridge with 10 sheets of postcard paper).
Setup (8.50)
The PictureMate FP90 was ready to print from a memory card in just 2 minutes. All that’s involved is taking it out of the box, inserting paper into the paper cassette, and inserting the ink cartridge into the ink compartment. Then it’s just a matter of inserting a memory card in the correct slot and pressing the On button.
On our test PC, Installing software for printing from the computer took about 3.5 minutes. With restarting the computer to accept changes and finish installation, the whole software process took only 5 minutes. Total box to print time was 7 minutes.
Drivers & Administration (5.00)
Driver tools for the Sony FP90 printer are minimal, as most of the utility is found within the printer’s menu itself. The two tabs that do offer options within the Properties windows accessed from software programs are Layout and Paper/Quality. Layout simply encompasses selections for page orientation and page order and number of pages per sheet. The Paper/Quality tab lists simply Paper Source and the option to print in black and white or color. Most of these options can more easily be made from the printer itself.
The Advanced button at the bottom of each tab provides more printer-specific options, such as setting the paper size (L or P size), borderless printing, auto fine print (auto, photo, or vivid), turning the auto touch-up button off or on, and adjusting RGB and sharpness settings, from -4 to +4.
Software (6.00)
The only bundled software included on the Sony DPP-FP90’s installation CD is the Picture Media Browser 2.0.05. This browser tool helps to organize photos on your system. The first time you open the program, a dialog box asks whether you would import your media files into the browser. Selecting OK allows the program to search your hard drive and bring up any image files, which are then displayed in the Folder list on the left. Clicking on one of these folders opens it and displays the contents in the view pane on the right. This view is customizable by various criteria, including by folder name, month taken, image size, camera, or file type, to name a few. The size of the images viewed can be adjusted as can the format of the view--either thumbnails or details. This program is on par with other manufacturer’s image browsing programs, meager for the most part but with a couple of editing surprises.
Some editing functions are possible in the View/Edit option under the Manipulate toolbar. The selected image is brought up in a separate window, with various viewing tools, such as zooming, rotating, etc. The Editing tool brings up options for automatic correction, brightness, saturation, sharpness, tone curve, red-eye reduction, and trimming. Most of these tools are fairly rudimentary in their selections, but the brightness and tone curve tools offer a little more than the typical browser program. Brightness can be set for highlights, shadows, or the entire image, and contrast can be set here as well. The tone curves is very similar to Photoshop’s Curves tool, and is very useful for correcting poorly exposed images.
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