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! The price per photo rivals traditional high street processing. 2) The economical and convenient consumable packs contain cartridge and paper for approximately 100 glossy 10x15cm photo prints is sold in a combo pack.

3) The 6 printing pigments are contained within a single-piece cartridge.

6) Selecting only photos on the storage media based on date of creation.

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 glossy photo paper (RRP £02.50)!

1) Like all photo printers I’ve used, it doesn’t automatically resample images, the relative resolution of a digital photo (ie its total output size) is slightly 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 removed is indicated by a border when previewing photos individually).

I regularly get 88-95 prints per cartridge, but I tend to do my photo adjustments with Paint Shop Pro before printing otherwise dark photos

Printing issues:

1) When printing photos, the LCD screen displays the total sheets to be printed and the number remaining, I would like information about the estimated lapse / time remaining. 2) Despite any claims by Epson, printing times are variable depending on factors such as ink level, complexity of the job and photo resolution. When printing groups of photos the time taken averages out to about 37 seconds for standard 5 megapixel prints. Printing 4 different Passport size photos takes about 1 minute and 64 seconds and index prints (20 photos per sheet) takes about 1 minute and 5 seconds (not including ink charging time with is about 20 seconds) .

This information is included when previewing photos individually.

You could say it’s a photo printer, so why create ‘bad’ prints? However, I often want to quickly print a ‘throw-away’ photo on cheap paper. 5) Good computer driver interface, but does not include all the photo effects & options available from the printers interface. 1) Photos are displayed in descending alphabetic order according to the photo file names, thus 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. 2) Cropping photos must be done one at a time, ie there is no way to apply cropping to a set of range of photos, annoying as this is often required for groups of photos and is time consuming.

3) when printing photos with frames, they can 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. 4) After scrolling through a set of photos and then printing a single image, the index preview returns to the first image in the set, not from the previous position, quote disorienting with large volumes of photos.

Summary:

Even with the above trivialities, the Epson PictureMate 500 (PictureMate Deluxe in the US) is an extraordinary product that anyone can use. RRP approximately £125.35, 256x154x167mm (2.8kg).

I think this is the most affordable, portable photo printer system on the market. Currently I give it 9.9/10 but I would give it 10/10 if Epson would fix the navigation and preview ‘issues’. I admit it is likely that it would not be commercially viable if all the above ‘issues’ were to be addressed; but most could be easily ‘fixed’ by making relatively small alterations to the firmware.

Meet the QuikCard ID Card Printing Package From Zebra

This bundled ID card printing solution is geared toward small to mid-level companies. The system features your choice of a P110i or P120i card printer. A packet of 200 PVC cards and a printer ribbon round out the collection. Both the P110i and P120i offer full color and monochrome printing using dye sublimation and thermal resin ribbon. Employee and student IDs, membership/loyalty cards, gift cards, and access devices are just a few. Zebra isn’t the only manufacturer offering a great starter package. This solution includes a single or dual sided printer, the ID Works Intro software, a 250 print ribbon and 500 PVC cards. The SP35/55 can also be used for contact and contactless smart card programming (the entry level Zebra printers offer only magnetic stripe encoding).