Customer Reviews

Epson PictureMate Charm Compact Photo Printer PM 225

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Photo quality is the most important thing to me. I'm making a photo album of my 'trip of a lifetime' and needed the flexibility of printing photos immediately and printing in different sizes, etc. I shot high-resolution photos on the trip. The photo quality from this printer is as good as I get at my local Fox Photo (high quality photo printer). The images are sharp and have excellent color saturation without beeing over-saturated and fake looking. I had some of the photos printed at Walmart as soon as I got back (first time I used them) and was very disappointed. The cost of print on this printer is pretty low also - .25 I have read. The first ink cartridge gets used up pretty quickly, 50 photos or so. Mostly it is priming the printer. Much better life on the second cartridge onward. I'm getting too wordy - anyway, I would definately buy this printer again, no question about it.

I just received my printer yesterday afternoon from Amazon and in about 20 minutes I was printing some of the greatest 4x6 pictures that I have ever printed!! I have always been an HP printer person - but just got tired of always having to buy more ink cartridges - and they are not cheap! So I figured up the cost of a print on glossy paper with this printer and looks like it will be about 27 cents per picture - that is about as cheap as I can take a disk to WalMart or Sam's and get them done - and the picture quality is just as good - maybe better. I still have my HP printer for those "bigger" prints that I need - but in my opinion you just can't beat this little printer for 4x6 and smaller prints, and it is so cute! I might have to get the rechargeable battery so I can take it to parties and things to give prints away - at that price it is totally doable.

CRB

I agonized about this decision for over a month reading a zillion reviews. Finally we bought this... and it's AWESOME! Better than we hoped! Not just the quality, but the pictures really are waterproof (we left one in a pot of water overnight to see) and seem really rugged (we tried to scratch off the image and it didn't work). We are using them to make postcards (we use spray-on elmers glue and pop on a piece of 4x6 card stock and... that's it) The quality is so far beyond what we were paying at the drugstore that the price difference per image feels totally worth it. The ONLY reason I'm not giving 5 stars is because I wish the screen was a bit bigger... but I guess that would have made the printer more expensive... and then I might not have bought it. The other thing I like about it is that it's very fast to get TO the pitcture that you want to print... just pop in the camera's card and it goes through the images and then you choose one and pop it prints. But it IS annoying that you can't really see the quality of your picture on the crappy screen... you have to have decided on the image on the camera (or on your computer, I guess, but that would take time). I also really like that it is so very very small and has a handle and is all "protected" when it's closed. It's easy to kind of throw around (we're gentle, but... you know.. we stuff it places). Bottom line.. I think anyone would be very happy with this. I'll never be able to go back to inkjet pictures. It's the perfect size for fast postcard printing which brings smiles to my granmother and it's crazy fast... but it has a crappy screen, but I don't really care so much about that. If this printer broke I would immediately buy another one.

This was purchased as a gift for my Senior parents. Easy to use for people who are NOT techno savy. Creates beautiful prints! Small and portable!

I bought this printer after reading reviews about it and other portable photo printers. I'm a photographer and I use this printer to print on-location event portraits. The quality and colors of the photos are wonderful. I use several SD ards and take 10 images per SD card, print directly from the card and recycle the card. Works great and the people love having the momento from the event.

I am so impressed with this printer! The pictures are amazing! The colors are so vibrant and I think the prints turn out better than they do from the drugstore. The reviews I read before I bought this printer stated that the ink cartridge that came with the printer ran out before the paper did, well my ink cartridge lasted for more than the paper so I had to dig into the extra pack of ink and paper to print more pics. I say if you are thinking about buying a printer to print 4x6 photos this is the one to have! I love it!

Easy to set up and use, either via a memory card inserted into the device or printing from your computer. I chose this over the more colorful Canon variety because the Canon had reviewers stating the 4x6 photos always came out with some of the picture missing (esp. off the top) unless you did a border with 3x5 which made for a smaller photo than you wanted. Well, the same issue happens here, unfortunately, despite the fact this is for 4x6 photos I have noticed my preview screen has more details to it than come up on the printed photo. Otherwise the setup is easy, the pictures - as someone has said - might be coming out a bit darker, bolder than true color, at least a few times I've been surprised by the darkness of a printed photo. It's not bad, but dramatic. The quality otherwise is a lot better than my former photo printer, which was a Canon, as this is about the quality I'd expect from a professional run at a Kodak shop so I've been very impressed. If you don't expect perfection this may work for you.

I have the PM 240, which is an older version of the PictureMate, but it has all the same components. It worked great for about a year, but over time the nozzles started clogging, until it finally stopped printing anything.

The Auto-cleaning function limits you to a certain number of cleans per ink cartridge, forcing you to purchase another cartridge if you need additional cleaning. And the Auto-clean function uses a LOT of ink.

Nothing inside is user-serviceable, so when the ink pad gets full, you can't just open it and drain it yourself. If it's not reset by an Epson tech, it won't let you print whether its cleaned or not. Also you can't clean the print heads if they get dirty, which is what happened in my case.

The good news is that it prints beautiful photos, and with the little battery add-on, you can take it with you to print on the go. The battery lasts for about an hour of printing, and each print takes about 40+ seconds, depending on the detail.

Bottom line, it's a nice photo printer and does a good job, but because you cannot clean it yourself or drain the waste ink container, consider it "disposable". At some point you'll have to take it to an Epson center for expensive service, or just buy a new one (which is what I did, but I chose a different brand).

THis worked really well with John WU's software for photobooth [...], it worked really great you can even buy perforated photo paper at [...].

Really great printer its wonderful

The quality of prints is superb regardless whether you print directly from the memory card inserted into the printer or from the computer. It is very compact. The ink cartridge lasts really long, making the cost per print lower than at discount stores. The quality is much higher though. Also take into consideration that Epson's ink is pigment based and will last a lifetime unlike those printing places that you have no control over the quality.
The setup process is smooth. I have went throgh the setup on Windows XP and Windows 7 without a single glitch.