Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

TLDR Ivy vs Sprocket: Comes down to personal preference . . . everything from instructions, ease of use, to Android app are nearly identical. Canon Ivy's portraits look better (less sharp is good here), but prints lose detail in dark areas. HP Sprocket prints are a teensy bit higher res, better gradations of color, but slightly sepia-ish. See photos. BOTTOM LINE They're both fun, easy to set up and use, and produce prints which any "normal" person would find perfectly acceptable, if not just plain awesome. ZINK photo paper packets are inter-changeable: I tried several kinds in both printers & found no difference in the quality, so buy whatever's on sale! Prints end up being about 50 cents each. (NOTE- the blue card in each pack is NOT interchangeable, so save the Canon blue card and reuse it when you use other brands of paper in the Ivy, etcetera. Also, I don't know if it's true for all mini-printers, but HP doesn't require the card inserted with every re-load.) DISCLAIMER: Both the Canon Ivy and HP Sprocket produced nice clear photos. I'm an artist and a photographer. A lot of my criticisms are for pixel-peepers and other weirdos like me. REVIEW I went into this with an open mind, looking for something that gave me "good enough" quality to paste snapshots into a casual travel journal at a reasonable cost. Having said that, I AM a serious photographer, so I did a lot of PREsearch, and I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd felt the need to return whatever printer I purchased. I bought both the Canon Ivy & HP Sprocket in order to compare the two, figuring I'd return one of them. HAH! I like both of them so much I'm not returning either, though I am giving one to my midle son, to justify the purchase. Just FYI-- he's a late-20s tech nerd, and, after test printing with me, he doesn't care which one he gets-- they are VERY, very similar. PRINT QUALITY I was happily surprised by the print quality of both the Sprocket and Ivy! There's a teeny bit of fringing I'd complain about in a larger/more expensive printer, but it's not troublesome in these small, just-for-fun prints. I'd also nit-pick about the sepia-ish tone of the HP prints. I tried a filter in the HP app and another in Snapseed, neither successful in offsetting the tone, and the HP filter noticeably reduced print quality, as did filters in the Canon app. Any nit-picking of the Canon prints would be due to loss of subtle gradations, especially in darker areas. For selfies, I preferred the slightly-glam looking prints produced by the Ivy-- my laugh lines were less noticeable! But for "art" prints, I generally like the HP better (resolution, no loss of detail in dark areas.) The HP also cost 2/3 of what I paid for the Canon. SET-UP The set-up process couldn't possibly have been any faster or simpler. Slide the top open, drop in a stack of paper, and go. Connected immediately via Bluetooth, no problem finding chosen folder or photo on device. SIZE Smaller than expected, very light, shiny, and slippery if you aren't careful. The rose gold isn't super-sparkly, but more metallic/pearly. PS- Buy the case.