Professional small-format photos the easy way, with a compact portable photo printer roughly the same size as a loaf of bread and engineered like a nuclear powered toaster! It makes digital photography easy and fun for all the family, even the Windows print driver is comparatively simple. This is practically the swan-song for the once lucrative but frustrating and time consuming commercial photo processing market.
The PictureMate 500 is marketed as a printing accessory for any digital camera, it supports direct printing from PictBridge cameras, popular digital camera technologies and a computer is optional for most printing tasks, however it can not execute complex manipulations, such as red eye reduction.
Slightly more expensive and 40% faster than Epson's original PictureMate printer, this updated model incorporates portability with the stylish look and well-designed functionality of its forefather with an improved menu system to boot.
It recognises JPEG and uncompressed TIFF files automatically, resolutions ranging from 80 X 80 to 4600 X 4600, printing from a camera, a memory card, directly as a printer or from a camera phone via the optional Bluetooth adapter (RRP £59.99); I just use my own inexpensive adaptor.
The stunning quality really is what makes this a good system, everything else is just very nice, if you want to see any slight vertical banding or ink droplets (flaws found on all inkjet printers) you have to look really closely, but unlike other inkjet-based dedicated photo printers which use a 3 colour process, you get professional small-format photos not just photo sized printouts.
