Mate for easy printing
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.