Fix Blead on Canon Selphy

When Canon released their line of Selphy printers almost a decade ago they probably never thought that these devices will be of any use to professional and serious amateur photographers. It turns out they are very handy for many tasks from just “having your work printed” to pairing images, preparing zines and using them for story boards when working on larger projects.

The printers use dye sublimation technology and provide adequate colour accuracy especially considering the low price of the device itself and the cost of a print. The major drawback of Selphy is its inability to print a full-size image without cropping it or adding unnecessary borders. This could be of little importance when printing selfies taken with your mobile phone. Photographers, on the other hand, spend a lot of effort framing the image both in-camera and at the post-processing stage and being able to print the image exactly as intended is critical.

Canon have been aware of the problem for many years, but sadly they do not consider it important enough to fix. Luckily, it is not that hard, so here is the solution.

The Fix

According to Canon specifications, the nominal postcard print size of Selphy CP1000 series is 150 by 100 mm or 1771 x 1181 pixels. If you print a calibration grid of that size without borders you will find that the actual image size is 136x92 mm or 1607 x 1087 pixels. By adding the corresponding margins to your image you can force Selphy into printing it almost without borders without cropping your carefully composed photograph. Since the print is not always perfectly aligned length-wise on the paper a small border of 1 mm can sometimes be visible. You can print the modified image using your system print dialogue. Remember to choose the “Fill the frame” setting and enable printing without borders.

The required borders can easily be added in your photo editing software but to simplify this mechanical task I made a simple Python package called selphyprint. You can also use the code embedded in this page to process the image.

Adjust Image

Choose the width of the border in millimetres you would like to add around your image (if any) and click the Upload Image button to select the image. The adjusted image will appear below. If you right-click on it you can save it (“Save Image As..”), and then send to printer using your standard system tools or open it in a new tab (“Open Image in New Tab”) and print it directly from the browser.

Add Border

Upload Image