BIOS: Technology Means Business

The PictureMate 280 (£145 ex. VAT) is Epson’s latest portable photo printer. Sitting at the top of the company’s range, the PictureMate 280 (215x152x180mm, 3.1kg) lets you enjoy the latest benefits of digital photography without sacrificing the family tradition of collecting and sharing your photos. In other words, it’s a brilliant product for those who find using a computer to manage and print digital photographs a chore, or for those who would like to make printing and sharing photos more sociable.

Along with the lower-end PictureMate 240 (£99.99 ex. VAT, no optical drive) you can print all your borderless 10x15cm photos in the comfort of your own home relatively quickly and easily - even without hooking the unit to a power outlet (Epson says you can print up to 140 photos on battery power, or remain on standby for 6 hour). The premium 4-colour (Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) output even ensures your photos will rival those produced from a photo-lab, but at around 20p per photo you’ll probably still only want to print the best ones.

Sporting a boxier design than the original PictureMate (a newly designed flip-open top offers better protection for the control panel), the two new models both work standalone, so there is no need to connect to your computer. They are easy to use with fast print speeds up to around 50 seconds per photo. The PictureMate 280 even features an internal DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive allowing you to print directly from an optical disc or save images from your memory card to CD-RW. Both printers also provide direct printing from digital camera memory cards thanks to USB Direct-Print, as well as PictBridge. There’s even an optional Bluetooth adapter for printing from a compatible mobile phone or PDA.

Four directional buttons with an ‘OK’ button in the centre make navigating the menus intuitive, while two smaller buttons offer access to functions tailored to what you’re viewing. Using these clearly labelled buttons, you can edit your photos; in addition to fixing the colour balance, removing red-eye, and cropping your images, the PictureMate 280 can apply a wide variety of fun effects, such as Disney-themed borders.

The printers feature Epson’s latest PhotoEnhance technology, automatically detecting the type of scene in an image and adjusting the colour reproduction and contrast. For example; in your portrait photos, the technology recognises the presence of a person and adjusts skin tone and brightness. You can also further improve photos using the crop and red-eye removal features. For your added convenience, you simply edit your photos directly from the flip-up 2.5-inch colour preview monitor.

Both models incorporate Epson’s Advanced Variable Sized Droplet Technology (Advanced VSDT). With five different droplet sizes they use small droplets of 2 picolitres for areas where fine detail is required and larger droplets where there are blocks of colour. As well as allowing Epson to provide fast printing speeds, Advanced VSDT works in harmony with the Epson Micro Piezo print head to produce premium quality photos with smooth gradations and tonality. They also feature a variety of presentation formats. You can choose from colour, black and white or sepia, as well as get creative with your photos by adding fun-frames, clip-art and text.

You can choose a template for a special occasion, for example, a birthday card or invitation, and there’s a range of flexible layout options. You can choose to print 20 borderless photos to a single sheet of 10x15cm photo paper to accompany your DVD/CDs of images so you can quickly identify the photos on your discs at a later date. Alternatively you can print four photos to a page which are suitable for identification cards or print your photos with or without a border.

Epson’s PicturePack (£29.49) is designed to accompany both products and contains everything you need for 150 photos. Epson has also launched an additional PicturePack for 50 photos (£13.49). So whether you want to print just a few of your favourite photos or all of them, there should be a PicturePack to meet your needs.

Supported memory cards supported include CompactFlash Type I/II, Micro Drive, SD, SDHC, MiniSD (with adapter), MMC, MS, MS Duo (with adapter), MS Pro, MS Pro Duo (with adapter), MS Micro (with adapter), MagicGate MS, MagicGate MS Duo (with adapter), xD Picture card, xD Picture card Type-M, xD Picture card Type-H. Having said that, we had problems reading our MiniSD and MMC Mobile cards and had to resort to connecting out Canon Digital IXUS 900 TI directly to the printer. Writing to a CD-RW disc is as simple as loading both memory card and CD-RW and pressing the ‘Save’ button.

The benefits delivered by the PictureMate 280 ensure it is a valuable addition to any family home. You can print your own top-quality photos quickly, easily and efficiently, and even back them up onto CD-RW. You have full control of what you print and when you print it, and you can get creative with built-in effects and digital frames. The additional quality enhancing features and creative templates ensure that regardless of your level of technical expertise, you can manage your own photographic memories to share with your friends and family. An excellent choice for families this Christmas…

[9] - Editors’ Choice

[Best Printer Pricing UK]
[Best Printer Pricing US]