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CNET editors' rating:
3.0 stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 70 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Economical; excellent print quality; connects directly to cameras, media cards, and external storage devices; compact; easy to operate; Mac and Windows compatible.
The bad: No color LCD for previewing or cropping images; AC-only operation; slow.
The bottom line: This portable photo printer produces quality output, but we wish it ran on batteries. It could stand to be a lot faster, too.
Specifications: Printer Type: Compact photo printer - Ink-jet - Color; Max media size: 4 in x 6 in; Connectivity technology: Wired; See full specs
Price range: $299.99
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 05/19/2004
- Released on: 05/08/2004
Editor's note: We have changed the rating in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale. Click here to find out more.
Touted by Epson as a "personal photo lab," the solidly built, 5.5-pound, portable PictureMate is certainly designed for traveling. Tuck back the handle, plug in the AC adapter, fold down the rear 20-sheet feed tray and the front delivery tray, and you're ready to go. The roughly 10-by-6-by-6-inch device has three multipurpose slots that accept CompactFlash I and II, Microdrive, SmartMedia, Sony Memory Stick, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and xD-Picture storage media. There are also USB and EXT/IF ports on the back for connecting external Zip, USB flash, or CD drives and printing from PictBridge or USB Direct Print digital cameras. The Epson PictureMate also has an optional Bluetooth adapter that enables you to print from Bluetooth devices that support standard Bluetooth printing profiles such as PDAs or mobile phones.The top-mounted controls include Print, Cancel, and Save Photo buttons and a 2-inch, monochrome LCD that displays easy-to-understand menus for selecting, enhancing, cropping, and printing images using a four-way control pad. A straight-through paper path ensures no-nonsense, no-bend printing with the sturdy Epson 4x6-inch photo stock.The Epson PictureMate lacks only two things to make it the perfect carry-anywhere picture machine: a battery-power option and a color LCD for previewing and selecting pictures. The similarly priced HP Photosmart 245 has the latter, while printers with a self-contained power source, such as the Canon CP-330, are typically much more expensive than the Epson. Since the PictureMate lacks a color LCD for previewing photos, you'll need to print out an index sheet and select from the numbered thumbnails when you're in standalone mode. In order to crop a shot, you'll have to print a reference template (which can be reused because the cropping areas don't change) and select from 18 suggested settings. If your digital camera supports DPOF (Digital Print Order Format) and has internal cropping and resizing features, it's probably a better idea to trim and select your pictures in the camera. Of course, when the PictureMate is connected to a computer, you can select and crop pictures there.
The printer comes with Epson's Film Factory, a versatile, album-style software package for Windows and Macintosh that lets you preview images, add text, and perform simple retouching, such as adjusting brightness and contrast, tweaking color, and removing red-eye. When you are printing from a computer, a progress gauge pops up on your screen and displays useful information such as the amount of ink remaining in the cartridge.The Epson PictureMate uses a single six-color ink cartridge to produce borderless or bordered water-, fingerprint-, and smudge-resistant prints that Epson claims will resist fading for 100 to 200 years. Our test prints were rich and brilliant, with solid blacks, saturated colors, and smooth, seamless gradients. We needed a 10X magnifier to detect extremely faint horizontal banding caused by the movement of the printhead. Images were adequately sharp and free of jaggies. Black-and-white prints had a suitably wide dynamic range, with dense blacks and pure whites without color casts.
It took 2.44 minutes to print a 4x6-inch photo, which is quite sluggish compared to other portable printers we've tested. The Canon CP-330 took 1.6 minutes to do the same job, and the Olympus P-10 cranked it out in 1.1 minutes. While it's certainly not a speed demon, the Epson PictureMate runs quietly and is very easy to set up and use. We did notice one performance quirk: when you swap out print cartridges, the PictureMate takes a few minutes to read the chip on the new cartridge before it starts printing.
CNET Labs project leader Dong Van Ngo contributed to this section of the review.
CNET Labs' photo printer performance (Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Minutes per photo |
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