BIOS: Technology Means Business

Epson's latest photo printer is based on the excellent PictureMate 500 but cuts features in order to slash costs by half. Most noticeable is the fixed, tiny LCD monitor instead of a large flip-up screen and a hashed menu system. Photo quality is still excellent and it retains support for wireless and battery-operated printing, but the PictureMate 100's unintuitive menu system and small monitor are a real disappointment. If you can live with these shortcomings, you should be very happy with the printer's water and smudge-proof photos that will stay brilliant for years longer than any other digital printing option. If you can stretch your budget, the PictureMate 500 is a much more user-friendly product.

Pros: Compact; built-in battery; Bluetooth ready; good print quality
Cons: Small, fixed screen; poor menu system; Bluetooth is optional

Epson's inkjet-based PictureMate 100 (256x305x167mm, 2.7kg) is the company's latest 6x4-inch dedicated photo printer, which now comprises three models. It sports the same compact design as the PictureMate and PictureMate 500, and includes a carrying handle and Lithium-Ion battery pack so you can print photos without being tethered to a mains adapter.

Unlike the more capable PictureMate 500 (£149 ex. VAT), the silver-and-white PictureMate 100 uses four dye-based inks compared to the PictureMate' 500's six ink set. This ink set allows for a lower cost and therefore opens up the range of users, in particular non-photo enthusiasts.

Unlike its big brothers, prints from the PictureMate 100 are also lower at 22p per photo, helping to make home photo printing more affordable. By comparison, print costs from the other two models are around 29p per print. The 1.5-inch colour LCD preview monitor is also smaller and fixed (the PictureMate 500 has a flip-up 2.4-inch screen), but it still helps you to print photos relatively quickly and easily.

In addition, you can still apply effects directly from the PictureMate 100's screen without needing to use a computer. For example, images can be changed from colour to black-and-white or a border or frame can be added. The PictureMate 100 also includes a built-in rechargeable battery, so you can print in different rooms of your home or take the printer round to a friend's house. The battery should power the printer for around 60 to 80 prints, or approximately 2 hour's of continuous printing.

Another neat feature of the printer is that it can print from any digital camera whether it be through a memory card (CompactFlash Type I/II, SD, mini-SD, xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick/Pro/Duo, Microdrive, MMC and SmartMedia), USB connection or PictBridge. Using the optional - and pricey - Bluetooth adapter (£59.99 inc. VAT) you can even print wirelessly from a mobile camera phone or PDA and you can print from an external CD or ZIP drive, or even a USB memory key. In addition, popular digital camera technologies, such as Print Image Matching (P.I.M.), Exif Print and DPOF, are automatically supported.

Unlike a regular inkjet printer that requires you to change ink cartridges, the PicturePack is a one box solution that contains ink and glossy photo paper - everything needed to produce 135 glossy photos. Replacement PicturePacks cost around £28.99 (inc. VAT). The downside is that it has an impractical media capacity of just 20 sheets, so you'd better set aside a few hours if you intend to print a lot of pictures.

Setting up the printer is a snap compared to a regular inkjet printer because you don't have to worry about attaching paper trays, inserting separate ink cartridges, or even running a printhead alignment test. In fact, the only thing you have to do before printing is insert the 4-colour photo cartridge into the dedicated compartment at the rear of the printer, place up to 20 sheets of photo paper into the paper input tray, add media to the paper-in tray, and then connect the supplied AC adapter - you don't even need to connect the printer to your computer using the supplied USB cable if you want to print directly from a memory card.

Print quality is ultimately what counts with a dedicated photo printer and output (5760x720dpi optimised) is virtually indistinguishable from the original PictureMate or the PictureMate 500, even if colours are a little more saturated. The biggest disappointment is the on-board menu system and controls, which are a mess and often require guesswork in order to navigate images, select the number or prints or add borders. Ultimately it's a cost issue, but it's a real shame Epson didn't stick to the same controls as those on the PictureMate 500 because it has made the product harder to use for its target market of non technical users.

Epson has also managed to increase the PictureMate 100's print speed by some 10 per cent. Whereas the original PictureMate took around around 2m 20s (in some cases around 3 minutes) to output a single photo and the PictureMate 500 around 1m 45s, the PictureMate is the quickest of the lot at 1m 29s per print (around 0.73ppm).

Photos are also water, smudge and fingerprint resistant for worry free handling. And according to independent research from Wilhelm Research Laboratory, photos should resist fading up to 100 years which is about two to four times longer than the leading brands of photo lab prints and about four to 20 times longer than prints from other dedicated 6x4-inch digital photo printers. [7]