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 remunerative but discouraging and hindering and time consuming mercantile photo processing market.
The PictureMate 500 is marketed as a printing accessory for any digital camera, it supports direct printing from PictBridge cameras, frequent digital camera technologies and a computer is optional for most printing tasks, notwithstanding it may not carry out complex manipulations, such as red eye reduction.
Slightly more pricey and 40% more immediate than Epson’s firstborn PictureMate printer, this modified model incorporates portability with the stylish look and well-designed functionality of it is forefather with an bettered menu scheme 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 thru the optional Bluetooth adapter (RRP £59.99); I just use my own inexpensive adaptor.
The stunning quality genuinely 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 in truth closely, but different from other inkjet-based consecrated photo printers which use a 3 colour process, you get professional small-format photos not just photo sized printouts.
It uses an exclusive archival 6 pigment (cyan, yellow, magenta, black, red, and blue) and hi-gloss Micro Piezo inkjet engineering science contained within a single-piece cartridge which means the prints are of better quality and last two to four times longer than the leading brands of inkjet based photo printer models.
Borderless 4×6-inch (15cm x 10cm), printing at a solution of 5,760-by-1,440DPI, takes a little underneath 90 seconds. The print size is fixed to 6x4in and it prints comparatively tardily equated to regular inkjet models, but the prints have a ranked lifetime of 104-years, as opposed to just 75 years for the standard chemical procedure offered by mercantile developers.
It is controlled by 12 command buttons scattered around a 2.4-inch colour LCD (320×240 pixels), it mechanically optimises each photo for colour and quality all of which makes this printer a formidable compact personal photo lab.
As well as a set of defaults, it has a range of fun effects, such as adding one of 16 frames, or printing in black and white or sepia tones. You may also zoom in on, and rotate, a specific area, cropping the rest of the effigy from your photo.
Its LCD screen is good because it allows simple operation without having to have a PictBridge intensified camera and being restricted to using the camera’s display, where you either use the camera to control printing or ‘mark’ all the images beforehand from the cameras interface, which I find annoying.
The price per photo rivals established high street processing. Prints cost approximately 22p each, this may sound comparatively high, but it’s rather reasonable equated to other committed photo printers – specially dye-sublimation models.
As a comparison, taking your images to Tesco costs 10p per print, but takes an hour irrespective of the number of images. My local Sava-centre charge 35p per print (5-colour process), but this takes when it comes to 50 seconds each;
Good points:
1) Competitive and cost effective, water, smudge immune fade free, lasting and professional small-format photographs in minutes at a solution of up to 5760 dpi. (saturation, skin tones, details all good).
2) The economical and commodious consumable packs integrate cartridge and paper for approximately 100 shiny 10x15cm photo prints is sold in a combo pack.
3) The 6 printing pigments are contained within a single-piece cartridge.
4) PictBridge heightened but does not require any specific technologies except for compatibility with one of the supported storage media formats.
5) Easy to use 3 step printing routine with an intuitive interface and an bettered navigation structure for the printer’s menu system.
6) Selecting only photos on the storage media based on date of creation.
7) Printing and copying directly to/from CD-R/RW, ZIP disk or Flash media.
The capacity to mechanically print respective photo sizes including passport sized photos (I haven’t yet attempted to use this feature in anger, but I see no reason why the passport office ought to refuse the product – the effigy is up to you. 
9) The biggest possible print size is fixed to 6x4in, conversely there are none of the paper handling difficultnesses related with multiple paper sizes.
Bad points:
The only negative remarks I have are rather superficial and it ought to be brought up that we computer science students seem to have a genetic propensity for pointless trivialities!
Generic issues:
1) It comes with 20 sheets of photo paper but the ink cartridge prints 100 photos. Because the paper input tray holds 20 sheets, that is all they supply, so buy an Epson PicturePack (Includes Photo Cartridge and 100 photo paper sheets RRP £21.50) or an 10 sheet pack or shiny photo paper (RRP £02.50)!
2) The rechargeable battery is not included (AAP £49.99), I would have remunerated a bit more if it was. Okay, if this wasn’t being marketed as a portable scheme then fine it is an option, but it is and have you ever purchased a laptop without a battery? I have therefore not located a provider within the United Kingdom that sells the optional battery.
3) No USB cable is included (RRP £2.50), perhaps they think it is unnecessary, but they do supply the computer drivers and have you ever purchased a printer without a selective information cable? I could comprehend no batteries but no USB cable?
Hardware issues:
1) Like all photo printers I’ve used, it doesn’t mechanically resample images, the relative solution of a digital photo (ie it is total output size) is more or less larger than the photo paper so approximately 1.5 cm around the perimeter of the photo is not printed (note that the area to be got rid of is indicated by a border when previewing photos individually).
2) Media gadgets may not be accessed concurrently, not actually a bad thing but annoying as I would like to setup a print run from 3 memory cards then walk away for a coffee.
3) Depending on the nature of your photos, the ink cartridge can, under particular conditions, only last for a little as regarding twenty pictures. I regularly get 88-95 prints per cartridge, but I tend to do my photo adjustments with Paint Shop Pro before printing other than as supposed or expected dark photos
4) The cover protecting the media card slots is more or less adynamic and just not very robust,
5) Unlike the media card slots, there is no cover protecting the EXT/Print and SUB ports, also these ports are rather deeply recessed into the body therefore preventing use of less compact flash media drives.
Printing issues:
1) When printing photos, the LCD screen displays the total sheets to be printed and the number remaining, I would like info when it comes to the approximated lapse / time remaining. It would likewise be nice if it displayed the photo being printed as a background for the screen (like it does for the top level menu screen)..
2) Despite any claims by Epson, printing times are variable depending on elements such as ink level, complexity of the occupation and photo resolution. When printing groups of photos the time taken averages out to when it comes to 37 seconds for ordinary 5 megapixel prints. Printing 4 dissimilar Passport size photos takes regarding 1 minute and 64 seconds and index prints (20 photos per sheet) takes when it comes to 1 minute and 5 seconds (not including ink charging time with is regarding 20 seconds) .
3) The index view does not show how a heap of sheets are required to finish the total job, this is commonly 1 per print but in the case of index, passport and double formats this is not true. This selective information is included when previewing photos individually.
4) This may sound like a strange complaint but, detached from photo enhancement being set to ‘off’ by default, there are no economy or solution options. You could say it’s a photo printer, so why give rise to ‘bad’ prints? However, I ofttimes want to speedily print a ‘throw-away’ photo on cheap paper. You may get economy paper so why waste ink on poor quality paper (and remembering the less ink you use, the more immediate the process)?
5) Good computer driver interface, but does not include all the photo effects & choices available from the printers interface. Note that the host apps native printing configuration overrides critical orientation, page area and aspect proportionality settings which need to be manually adjusted.
6) The preview option of the computer interface does not grant changes to the settings, you may only cancel. Although this isn’t hard, it is more or less annoying if the host application does not save the last used settings so you will have to then begin again from the default settings.
Interaction Issues:
1) Photos are displayed in descending alphabetic order according to the photo file names, therefore photos from a camera will seem to be displayed in the order they were taken, but this is totally dependent on the naming conventions of your camera. This may seem quote disorienting with big volumes of photos organised with real file names.
Most often times photos are named with a short prefix then an incremental value equivalent to the total number of photos taken since it was firstborn used.
2) Cropping photos ought to be done one at a time, ie there is no way to implement cropping to a set of range of photos, annoying as this is ofttimes required for groups of photos and is time consuming.
3) when printing photos with frames, they may not be rotated or cropped and there is no preview when printing photos with frames from a media card, as opposed to the 16 default frames where there is. This means the manipulation ought to be done elsewhere first.
4) After scrolling through a set of photos and then printing a single image, the index preview returns to the initial effigy in the set, not from the former position, quote disorienting with huge volumes of photos.
5) Scrolling through a set of photos may begin at the beginning or from the end of the group but the index view could be more effective if there was a way to ‘skip’ forward and backwards through each set of 9 photos, in addition to scrolling forward and backwards through the photos individually.
6) There is no way to filter photo formats, all JPEG and TIFF images are shown, I would like to select which types are displayed. Also I would like it to discern any ‘unpaintable’ images (ie too big/small/wrong resolution), rather of ignoring them.
Software Issues:
1) The directory structure of the storage media is ignored by the preview and selection displays, ie all photos are grouped together irrespective of their physical emplacement within the storage media.
A file explorer type view or a good deal of separation among photo sets would be nice. Note that the display may be sorted by date, but that’s not rather helpful sufficient for a big volume of photos.
2) The date & time stamp, colour, size and position are not configurable, annoying if photos occur to include yellow, orange or red in the botton right area (depending on orientation). There is no format for a 2 digit year and the most compact format is american ie yyyy.mm.dd, (ie backwards and full stop (not slash) delimited)
3) Depending on the relative resolution, photo previews are not generated instantaneously and initially construct a low-res picture on the LCD but refines speedily – not a real issue but this may be time consuming if scrolling through a great deal of preview displays looking for a photo.
4) There is no provision to organise or manipulate the images on the storage media, since the directory structure is altogether ignored, but I would like the capacity to selectively delete groups by date or chosen photos and the capacity to format the media, in truth this may be done from the camera but that’s not always possible, I often find somebody has taken the media reader and the camera is in use.
Summary:
Even with the above trivialities, the Epson PictureMate 500 (PictureMate Deluxe in the US) is an extraordinary product that anybody may use. RRP approximately £125.35, 256x154x167mm (2.8kg).
I think this is the most affordable, portable photo printer scheme on the market. Currently I give it 9.9/10 but I would give it 10/10 if Epson would repair the navigation and preview ‘issues’. I confess it is likely that it would not be commercially viable if all the above ‘issues’ were to be addressed; but most could be without apparent effort ‘fixed’ by making comparatively little alterations to the firmware.
Box Contents:
Epson PictureMate 500 Personal Photo Lab;
Power Cords;
PictureMate Photo Cartridge;
PictureMate Photo Paper – 20 sheets;
User’s Guide Kit: CD-ROM and User’s Manuals;
Main Features:
Light with easy carry handle;
DC and optional lithium-ion battery power;
Optional Blue tooth print adapter;
PictBridge intensified operation;
Not dependant a PictBridge camera;
PIM & ExifPrint complaint;
Brightness, saturation, sharpness correction;
Photo enhance, rotate, interference control;
Show/Print index prints;
Special Features:
Show/Print by date;
Printing with/without borders;
Printing 2 photos per sheet with/without borders;
Printing black & white, sepia tone (old-fashioned look);
Printing with/without time & Date stamp (orange);
Digital zoom (cropping);
View memory media as a slide show;
Supported storage media formats:
CompactFlash Card;
Memory Stick;
Secure Digital Card;
SmartMedia Card;
xD Picture Card;
Memory Stick Pro;
MultiMediaCard;
MicroDrive;
Top Tier Product Once You Get the Hang
WARNING! Not for PictureMate Pal, Snap, or Flash