Canon Selphy Photo Printer

UK Price: £104.79 (inc VAT)
US Price: $79.99 (ex. Tax)

The downside of hoarding endless gigabytes of digital photos is that hauling out your laptop to show them off just doesn’t have the same charm as passing around a photo album. One possible remedy to this conundrum is the Canon Selphy CP780, a tiny printer specifically designed for digital photos.

The Selphy measures less than 7in in width and 3in in height, and has a 2.5in LCD screen for browsing the contents of your media card. It will read from SD, miniSD, MMC, MMC+ and RC-MMC, in addition to Sony’s MS and MS Duo cards. Printing a snap takes around a minute and the glossy paper helps to produce finely detailed prints with accurate colours and deliciously dark blacks.


You can buy 72 postcard-sized sheets of the paper and three colour ink cartridges for a reasonable £20 from Amazon (this works out at 2.8p per picture). The Selphy has the ability to apply red-eye correction and effects such as Sepia, making a photo look as though it was taken in the early 1900s. This is a seriously nifty piece of kit for just over £100.

Wacom Bamboo Pen

UK Price: £49.10 (inc VAT)
US Price: $69.99 (ex. Tax)

We looked at budget Wacom's Bamboo Fun tablet earlier in the year in Custom PC, and it was a charming tablet that, was, at £70, a steal. Wacom's newest Bamboo tablets are even better - and cheaper, too. The Bamboo Pen has a sleek black design, and the basic version costs only £50. The pricier Pen and Touch adds the ability to use the tablet as a multi-touch input pad, but the basic Pen version still does everything you'd want a first tablet to do.

Obviously it makes actually drawing in program such as Photoshop easier, but it has benefits when you're editing photos too - it makes selecting specific areas simpler, and gives more natural and precise control to actions such as dodging and burning which can really help when you're trying to add punch to your pictures.

The Bamboo Pen has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity so you can achieve some great results with it; it's quite small, as tablets go - the active area is only 147 x 91mm - and unlike earlier versions, you don't get a copy of Photoshop to play with. That said, the Bamboo Pen makes an excellent first tablet, that's a bargain at under £50.