I have researched the purchase of a small 4 x 6 photo printer for home use that does not require a computer to print. This Epson seems the way to go. Most are dye sublimation printers. This one is an ink jet. Prints are about half the cost at 29 cents each. That is about the cost of an online print service or an in store machine at a drug store. Quality appears to be excellent.
This from PC Magazine: The review is on the previous version and his concerns were addressed with the new Deluxe Viewer Edition. Something about the word “Deluxe” that bugs me.
| M. David Stone | |
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The original Epson PictureMate impressed us enough to earn the Editors’ Choice for dedicated photo printers, and it has held on to that position against all comers. The PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition ($249.99 direct) maintains all the features we liked in the first PictureMate (from true photo-quality output to a low cost per print) and adds still more, most notably a color LCD to let you preview prints. That makes it a shoo-in as our new Editors’ Choice. Like the original, the new PictureMate is designed for portability, but even more so. Both measure 6 by 10 by 6 inches (HWD), weigh 5.5 pounds, and have a handle and a shape that make them look like a mini boom box. But the Deluxe Viewer Edition also has a battery option ($69 direct) with enough juice for a claimed 60 to 80 prints (approximately two hours of continuous printing, according to Epson), so you can take it with you to print photos on the spot, even if there’s no place to plug in a power cord. Setup is just as easy as with the original. Simply slide the single six-color ink cartridge—with cyan, yellow, magenta, black, red, and blue inks—into the slot in the back, load the photo paper, connect the power cord, and you’re ready to print from a camera, external CD or ZIP drive, a USB memory key, or any type of memory card, although you’ll need an adapter for miniSD cards and some Memory Stick formats. To print from your computer, the only additional steps are to connect by USB cable and run the automated install program. You can also add Epson’s optional Bluetooth adapter ($69 direct) for wireless printing. The most obvious difference from the original model is the color LCD and a slightly different set of menu control buttons. We found the menus easy to understand and use, and the LCD bright and easy to read. The menu choices are well thought out, with options, for example, to mark individual photos or print everything. You can also set the defaults to match the settings you use most often. And you’ll find options to crop and resize photos, adjust brightness, add frames, and more. The preview images were a little blurred, but once you realize that the output won’t also be blurred, it’s easy enough to ignore that. The Deluxe Viewer Edition also improves on the original’s performance. We timed it at 1 minute 19 seconds to 1:45 for each photo, whether printed from a computer, memory card, or Canon PowerShot S60 camera. That’s roughly a 45-second improvement in speed. Even better, the image quality is just as good, which makes it a match for film-based photos. Both models use the same ink and paper, which means the photos for the Deluxe Viewer Edition are also waterproof and smear-proof even immediately after printing, and they cost only 29 cents per print. That’s a big saving compared to thermal-dye printers, which can cost more than twice as much—or a 30-dollar difference for every 100 photos you print. When we reviewed the original PictureMate, we said that we’d like it even better if it had a color LCD for previewing images, but that was the only important trick it missed. The PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition adds that missing color LCD, as well as faster printing and a few more tricks. And, indeed, we like it even better. |
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1 Tom Hedge // Aug 29, 2005 at 7:51 pm
Dedicated photo printers are most often designed to print 4 x 6-inch snapshots directly from your digital camera without needing a computer. The industry has yet to settle on a term for these. We’ve seen them reviewed as portable photo printers, compact photo printers, snapshot printers and personal photo printers. They are best suited for consumers who only want a simple and easy way to print digital photos. Keep in mind that some full-sized inkjet printers can provide 4 x 6-inch prints that don’t need to be trimmed and camera-direct printing—in addition to handling the rest of your printing needs. See our separate report on inkjet printers for general-use models that also print small-format photos.
The main draw of these small-format photo printers is ease of use and convenience. Their small size makes them extremely portable—especially the models that can print directly from a camera without needing a computer. However, editors at Popular Photography magazine say that consumers interested in accurate color should use a computer to print, rather than printing directly from the camera. Editors tested photo printers by printing the same photo from the same camera, using three interfaces: Hooking the camera up directly to the printer via PictBridge (an industry-standard transfer protocol) and a USB cable, removing the camera’s media card and inserting it into the printer’s media slot and connecting to the printer by linking the camera to the computer with a USB cable (editors weren’t specific as to whether any photo-editing software was involved). While Popular Photography’s editors admire the sharpness and detail of the resulting prints, they found that the color is way off when the prints are made through a direct connection or when the camera’s memory card is inserted into the printer. These experts agree that snapshot printers are fun and convenient, but say you’ll still get better results the hard way—by uploading your pictures to your computer.
The best reviews we’ve found on portable inkjet and dye-sublimation photo printers are from PC Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and PC World, all of whom compare at least four models, judging each on print quality, speed and price. CNet.com also offers informative reviews, but this Web site mostly evaluates models individually, with few comparisons to others. We checked for consumer-written reviews at Amazon.com, Epinions and PCPhotoReview.com, but since these portable photo printers are fairly new, they have not yet amassed many reviews.
We’ve found PC World magazine’s cost analysis to be especially helpful. Editors enlisted the assistance of the Imaging Products Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology to assess ink and paper consumption. The results are surprising. Compared to processing digital photos at a store (which averages 28¢ per print) or using an online printing service (which averages 35¢ per print including shipping), photo printers are by far the most expensive option (averaging 55¢ per photo, not including the cost of the printer itself). According to PC World, only the Epson PictureMate (*est. $200) is cost effective compared to in-store and online printing, with photos averaging about 29¢ each.
Though per-photo costs vary widely, experts say that (generally) photo quality among portable printers is very good (especially if you use your computer interface), rivaling the output of photo labs and full-sized printers. One exception is the Dell Photo Printer 540 (*est. $170). Although this model is less expensive than competing models like the Epson PictureMate, several experts say the Dell’s photos aren’t as nice, some noting a problem with banding in photos. At PC World, expert Paul Jasper applauds the Dell’s speed—this model prints a photo in a little over a minute and is the quickest tested—but agrees that it prints “the least attractive pictures.”
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