Business Printing Blog

The Epson PictureMate PM250 when closed looks for all the world like a woman’s vanity case, complete with handle.

Luckily the colour scheme is not in some shade of pink or I’d have serious misgivings about carrying the printer around with me.

In fact, the plain white casing with the brown-coloured lid (which also acts as a paper feed tray) is a pretty nice design, and the advantage is that the entire machine closes up tight when not in use.

This means the printer’s internals are protected from dust and creepy-crawlies wanting to make a home in it.

Up and running

The PictureMate is very easy to use overall, and controls are large and very easy to figure out – I got started printing within minutes of opening the package.

The PM250 comes with a multi-card reader, a USB PictBridge port and a 2.5in LCD screen for completely PC-less printing.

Add the optional battery pack and the optional Bluetooth adaptor, and the PM250 becomes portable AND wireless! The PictBridge port, although meant to connect PictBridge-compliant cameras, also reads and prints from a USB thumbdrive if you connect one to it.

This printer has a very high resolution of 5,760 x 1,440dpi – that may sound like a much higher resolution than the 300 x 600dpi of the Canon ES1, but remember that an inkjet has to have a higher resolution because it lays down ink droplets next to one another to form gradations and different colours.

A dye-sublimation printer achieves this by overlaying colours ON TOP of one another.

This difference means that although a dye-sub printer might sound like it has less resolution, in actual fact, both the inkjet and a dye-sub printer like the Canon ES1 can reproduce similar levels of detail.

Performance

The Epson Claria inks that come with the PM250 are said to last for 200 years but the documentation says that this will only be achieved if you store your prints inside a photo album away from light, air and humidity.

If you leave them out in the open without any protection whatsoever, you’re going to quickly find that your prints will start to fade within a matter of months.

First off, we found that just like the Canon ES1, the Epson PM250 is a little choosy when it comes to the the SD cards that it accepts.

Again, the 1GB SanDisk card we had worked with no problems when we inserted it while the 1GB Transcend just refused to work in the PM250.

In case you think the Transcend is faulty, it most certainly is not – it works fine in all the cameras I’ve tried it in and even on my Pocket PC.

With the SanDisk, however, the Epson worked with no problems at all – by default when you insert the card, the PM250 displays a series of small thumbnails.

The controls are very easy to figure out. I worked out all the features without having to read the manual and I’m sure even non-techies will be able to.

Just like most ultra-portable printers, the PM250 also has other “fun” effects like adding different types of borders to your photos.

Print quality

Our first prints straight out of the device with the default settings selected turned out really well, with really neutral results and very, very good sharpness, although there was very slight vertical banding visible in plain areas of the photo; visible only when you look very closely at the print.

Straight out of the printer without any enhancements, photos were pretty true-to-life, which might look a little dull when compared to the bright and sometimes overly-saturated results of some of the other printers in our test.

However, this is easily remedied as the printer’s good manual controls allow you to adjust photos to your liking. We found that we could make a print that looked similar to one by the Sony DPP-FP90 – just by pushing up colour saturation to “+2″ and brightness to “+1″ in the “Edit” menu.

There is also a PhotoEnhance option where the printer will automatically adjust brightness and contrast to fix underexposed shots.

PhotoEnhance worked well in practice, and corrected some underexposed shots, although as far as we could tell, it doesn’t mess with the saturation controls.

The PM250 has a black-ink cartridge in addition to the cyan, magenta and yellow so it produces very solid blacks compared with the HP Photosmart A516, which produces black by mixing all three colours.

Print speed on the PM250 is excellent and the printer consistently spat out prints in about 48 seconds from the moment you pressed the “print” button.

The Epson 4 x 6in paper that came with the printer has a special water-resistant coating – once the ink is properly dry on the print, it’ll actually withstand quite a bit of water thrown at it.

Our first test was to put a few water droplets and leave it to sit for a while before wiping off with a tissue – the print survived with not a trace of ink on the tissue, so we put it under a running tap and the print survived again.

While the print did go a little opaque when wet, once it was dry it looked as good as new, without a trace of damage at all.

Unlike a dye-sub printer where the colour ribbon lasts for exactly the stated number of prints, how long a single cartridge of an inkjet like the Epson will last depends on what you print.

If you print lots of photos of predominantly one colour, that colour will run out first and thus the cartridge will get exhausted faster.

However, based on the fact that the cartridge of the PM250 is supplied with 150 pieces of 4R paper, we estimate each print to be about 63sen if it manages to print on all 150 pieces – that’s comparable with the price of a photolab print.

Assuming the worst case scenario, even if it prints about half that, the price per print is about RM1.24 which is higher than a photolab print but still cheaper than the cost-per-print of the HP Photosmart ES1.

Overall, the Epson PhotoMate PM250 performed very well indeed.

It is fast and produces very good quality prints and if you follow the storage guidelines, the prints should last you a long time.

Pros: Fast; good quality prints; easy to use; reasonably good manual-editing options; water-resistant prints.

By Matthew Henry

SYDNEY: Kodak today unveiled its strategy to enter the consumer inkjet printer category through JB Hi-Fi with a new business model designed to slash the cost of printing by up to 50 per cent.

Kodak has launched its first consumer inkjet printer, the EasyShare 5300 all-in-one (RRP $299), which the brand claims represents a strategic move to gain a foothold in the local printer market by offering consumers significant savings for home printing.

“This is an extremely exciting time for Kodak as it marks our entry into a new market category,” said Kodak product manager – inkjet systems, David Santer.

“We have been in the printing business for more than 100 years. We have combined our consumer electronics expertise with our commercial inkjet printing legacy to design products for the home printing market.”

According to Kodak, the EasyShare 5300 has been under development for over two years offers a number of innovative features that will allow consumers to save up to 50 per cent on the cost of printing documents and Kodak lab-quality photos using premium, pigment-based inks.

Kodak has developed a new inkjet system which it claims will deliver superior efficiency for photo and document printing, allowing consumers to feel more comfortable printing at home.

Kodak claims research conducted by Galaxy in May 2007 shows that although 81 per cent of Australian families have a printer in their home, 77 per cent of them find the cost of ink to be expensive and therefore limit themselves and their children’s printing.

“For far too long Australian consumers have felt restrained from printing due to the high cost of ink,” said Santer.

“Our new inkjet system gives consumers the freedom to print documents and photos frequently, easily and affordably with exceptional quality that lasts a lifetime under typical home display conditions,” he said.

Kodak today released figures which it claims prove the printer will save consumers money.

“Independent testing conducted by Quality Logic reveals that consumers who spend A$5 on ink can on average, print 52 4×6-inch photos with the Kodak System, compared to only 18 4×6-inch photos for the leading consumer desktop all-in-one printers,” said Kodak in a statement.

“Consumers who spend A$5 on ink can produce 221 black text documents on the Kodak System, compared to 77 pages for leading competitors. This equates to under 10 cents of ink per 4×6-inch colour photo and 2.26 cents of ink per black-and-white page.”

The EasyShare 5300 printer features printing, scanning and copying capabilities and includes a high-resolution colour LCD display for easy viewing and editing that works with most memory cards.

The printer will be distributed through JB Hi-Fi’s 73 stores nationally from mid-September.

Press release, August 7; Esther Lam, DIGITIMES [Tuesday 7 August 2007]

ProMOS Technologies announced today that it has signed a technology license agreement with Toppan Printing to manufacture CMOS image sensors utilizing Toppan Printing’s on-chip color filters and micro lens technologies. In addition to the technology license agreement, ProMOS and Toppan Printing will also extend the collaboration to a business partnership.

ProMOS indicated that it plans to manufacture the CMOS image sensors at its first 12-inch fab (Fab 2, Hsinchu). As this fab will soon become fully depreciated, the memory maker stressed that production at this fab should offer the company with advanced products on competitive costs, said company chairman and president ML Chen.