Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

TLDR Sprocket vs Ivy: Comes down to personal preference . . . everything from instructions, ease of use, to Android app are nearly identical. HP Sprocket prints are a teensy bit higher res, better gradations of color, but slightly sepia-ish. Canon Ivy's portraits look better (less sharp is good here), but prints are higher contrast. 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 HP card and reuse it when you use other brands of paper in the HP Sprocket, 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 HP Sprocket and the Canon Ivy 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 bought the Sprocket 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. Based on the low cost-per-print, reported quality and ease of printing, and decent reviews of the Android app, I chose the HP Sprocket. After trying it out for a week, I bought the Canon Ivy, 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 middle 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. After testing and using for a couple of weeks, I'm very pleased with the HP. If I don't update this review-- I'm STILL pleased. 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. NOTE-- The ever-so-slightly sepia tone doesn't bother me enough to return the HP printer, or even to mess around with more filters. I think it's just an artist thing, honestly. A friend owns the Fujifilm printer, and the prints are ridiculously dark-- I would have returned THAT! 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, app didn't force me to sign up for an account online-- though location must be enabled to print from phone-- no problem finding chosen folder or photo on device. NOTE- The super-short instruction card made me think I should lift THEN slide to open the printer, when it's kind of the opposite-- slide to lift. AND One mildly funny side-note: as a darkroom-trained photographer, I automatically feel a jolt of panic every time I see the "unexposed" photo paper just sitting right out there in the open. SIZE HP is smaller than expected, very light, and has a strangely soft, pet-able surface. The blue is very dark, kind of Iris-tinted, very pretty. Canon is slightly larger, shiny, and slippery if you aren't careful. The rose gold isn't sparkly, but more metallic/pearly. PS- Buy the case.