Customer Reviews

Epson PictureMate Personal Photo Printer

5 star:		(66)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Before I bought the Epson PictureMate, I had some of my digital photos printed at the local drug store. Then I took them in to the store where I was going to buy my Picture Mate and asked them to print the same pictures so I could compare the quality.

There was no comparison! The pictures printed by the Epson PictureMate were 100% better than the same pictures when they were printed commercially. So I bought it immediately.

For $29 you get a six jet ink cartridge plus 100 sheets of 4 x 6 paper -- making the cost 29 cents per photo, same as in the store. Epson guarantees that you can print 100 pictures from the ink cartridges. Being somewhat cheap, I have printed several more pictures after the 100 sheets ran out. I did find that the quality on another brand of paper is not as good as on the Epson paper. They probably design the ink and paper to be used together.
I am very satisfied with my Epson PictureMate. We took a long vacation this summer in a travel trailer, and it is compact enough to store easily, and easy enough to use that when I wanted to print up some of my photos I did.

I have owned the Epson PictureMate for the past five months and have printed at least 1000 pictures with it. No other photo printer I have ever owned comes close. The prints are dry coming out of the printer, scratch resistant, and gorgeous. They are equal in quality to 60 cent prints from a photo shop and superior to what you can get at CVS, Costco, or online. I routinely get at least 150 prints from each cartridge (extra paper is available from Epson at $14/100 sheets) so the cost per print is much less that the 29 cents advertised. I have only had to clean the print head once. I use Photoshop Elements to crop and edit all my photos and have never had the cropping problem described in previous reviews. I suspect that some of this my be due to the camera not being set to take 4x6 ratio shots.

A few minor caveats: You MUST use Epson PicureMate paper. Results are poor to fair with anything else. But at these prices, so what. Printing is s--l--o--w. Paper tray is too small.

I've had this printer for over a month now and I've printed over 100 photos from the cartridge that was provided. I am VERY happy with the quality of the photos. Not only are they sharp but the color is beautiful and saturated. AND the prints are finger print proof!! (I'm very anal about that so this is a huge plus for me.) As a photographer, they're perfect for giving away as self-promotion items. I was able to print directly from my computer (I have an Apple G5) and from a USB flash drive without any problems. I printed a friend's wedding photos in black and white and in color and they couldn't believe it was printed at home.

There are only a couple reasons why I did not give this printer 5 stars. One was the lack of portability. A battery option would have been nice, especially since it is compact and comes with a handle. Also, there is no display to see what you are printing. How can you crop a photo without knowing what you're cropping??

I hope Epson will take these things into consideration and include these options in the next model.

As for those of you who have had problems with the printer cropping your photos when you didn't ask it to, it is because your camera may not be taking 4x6 photos. The printer will fit the photo the best it can but it will have to cut some information out in order to print it on the given size of the paper.

Overall, I am very happy I got this printer. I highly recommend it!

This is the killer of the last die hard film camera users! I purchased this printer for myself to go with a simple Sony 3.1 digital camera. My wife is the one in the family that takes all the snapshots of kids and family functions and vacations. She has resisted the digital photography revolution up until now due to the costs and hassle associated with digital photography. After one week of having this printer she changed her tune 100% and now has switched to digital photography solely due to this printer.

We've had this printer for many months and found it to be great. The ink outlasts 100 prints and you can by the Espson paper separately. So it is getting even better than 29 cents per print. The lack of a screen on the printer isn't that bad as we delete unwanted prints with the camera's functionality. It does cut off the head of the photo a bit, we are now careful to make sure the subject is not to the very top of the picture to workaround this problem.

Quality definitely is better than comparable drop off photo shops, we printed the same photo at home and had them developed at local drop offs to compare.

Only other minor annoyance is when you want to print just one or two photos on a card, there is no way to know what number the priter thinks they are without printing a thumbnail sheet(s).

I've had to copy the desired shots to another card via my computer as a solution to save time hassle when I want to do this.

This thing is great for basic snapshot photography people. If you take a lot of pictures and are always droping them off at local processors, this will change that forever. Its so easy to use, my six year old can even do it. The kids love to wait while the photos come out!

Great printer if all you need is 6x4 pictures. The print quality it's as advertised, top lab quality. Low price per print, since the "ink", in fact pigment, will last you more then 100 photos.
On the down side, a little bit slow (but not 6-7 minutes like someone post it here), but considering the quality of the photos it's worth it. Also known poor Epson support.
Now if you print from desktop, the Epson driver will still somewhat crop your picture, even after you crop to 6x4 in Photoshop or something like that. That's because the printer driver increases the size of the print to allow for sloppy alignment and the edges of the photo are oversprayed (printed off the edge of the paper) when borderless is selected.
If this is a problem for you, there is a work around. Just add a border of about 15 pixels before you print, and the driver will remove the border and no additional cropping of the picture. There you go...Happy printing....

I only make 8x10 prints, so I would not even have looked at this printer, except I was looking for one for my sister--something simple, something that did not need to be hooked up to their computer. (The last thing we hooked up to her PC crashed their AOL. Her husband was not pleased!)

I've also never owned an Epson, but this one could not be beat. As I write this, there is no other 4x6 printer that compares to this one in costs. You get prints for 29 cents each. And they are waterproof. The printer itself is simple to use; my 9-year-old nephew figured out how to make prints just from reading the screen info. It also has a nice handle, so you can just take it with you on vacation or to other houses for holidays or parties. As stated, it does not need a computer. It reads cards, and has PictBridge; so, all PictBridge cameras can be connected to it.

The only problem I saw with it was it cropped the top of a picture by itself, which left someone a bit headless. But that may be something easily adjusted. Actually, this printer is too new right now to know if it has any major flaws. It seems to me it's always the users and not the editorial reviewers who actually discover most flaws in products.

If it has no flaws, however, as I said, it cannot be beat by any other 4x6 printer right now. Independent studies by Wilhelm Imaging Research even show the photos from this printer should last 104 years! Thus, it is truly the perfect printer for families or anyone else who make nothing but 4x6 prints, and lots of them!

I did a ridiculous amount of research on photo printers before purchasing my Epson PictureMate Personal Photo Printer and contrary to what at least one other poster has stated, the archival quality of these prints (when the Epson ink/paper refills specifically made for this printer are used) are better than lab prints. (Wilhelm Imaging Research is a good place to begin if you want to research this issue.)

My first complaint is something that is apparently fixable. When printing from a desktop, the printer crops your photo slightly. It does this even if you've already edited your photo to the appropriate 4x6 size. However, after reading Alfy's review (see below), it seems there is a solution to this problem (thank you Alfy).

My second complaint is that the only paper option Epson gives you for this printer is glossy paper. I'd really like to see a matte option.

Regardless, this printer produces such amazing prints at such a low cost that I'm giving it 5 stars anyway.

Not bad for the price, but far from excellent in print quality as many reviewers are raving about! Do not be fooled and realize the short comings of this printer, and it's limitations. Over all I rate it at about 4 stars, would give it 5 starts but it is very slow, see below.

First of all, if you are using a computer, and not stand alone, the supplied software from Epson, Software Film Factory 3.05 is quite useless, apart from the diver. You cannot print for example two photos onto one sheet, the wallet size option, as shown on the box the printer comes in. To do this you need a different type of software, or have to disconnect the printer from your cpu and use as a stand alone.

Secondly, the quality of print is, well let's just say far from the desired, unless you click digital camera correction and also on the fine detail setting, and with these two options checked it takes about 6-7 minutes per print, to print ONE copy of the image. This is a very slow process for a 4x6" print but it is also the only way to get quality prints. For the record I have an Intel 3.0+ Ghz with HTT, IBM cpu with 1024 MB of ram, 800Mhz front side bus, thus it is not a slow processor running XP pro.

Thirdly, if you use the printer as a standalone, to crop an image you have print a contact sheet which gives you variations of what is available, thus you just wasted an extra print or two before you get what you were after in the first place.

Fourthly, the colors will need some adjusting to get good quality prints via your software. If you own Photoshop CS, or even Nikon's own Nikonview 6.1, as I do, to edit and to print, the above points except for the slow speed, can be overcome very easily, and can get very satisfactory images for about the same price or less that you would get at local photo lab with some effort of your own and with additional software to correct the limitations.

As for digital photography replacing film, the cameras certainly now can do it, but print quality still has a bit of catching up, unless using dye-sublimation type of a printer is used, at a much greater expense which of course limited to 8x10 in size. The Epson PictureMate is a good product at an economical price, for 4x6 snap shoots with some reservations as noted.

I am an amateur digital photo enthusiast and recieved this for Christmas. At first, I loved it! The picture quality was great, very close to lab quality digital prints. It seemed fairly easy to use and had fun little editing features like cropping, sepia effects and the ability to print wallets as well as 4 x 6. However, once I previewed some other photo printers, including the little HP 375 portable unit, I found that having the LCD screen to view your photos before printing is a MUST unless you're connected to the computer (which sort of defeats the purpose of a little portable unit). With the Epson, you have to guess where you're cropping and can't see what your image will look like with different effects (black/white or sepia) until you print them. That, combined with having to print the index card to know what number your image is from your memory card (which only fits 20 images per sheet and changes once new pictures are taken) can really eat up your ink and paper...making it less cost effective than the suggested .29 cents per print for actual pictures. I think if this unit had the LCD preview screen it would be just perfect!

I was so tired of taking my pictures to CVS, Costco, etc. So I decided I wanted a home printer for pictures. I kept telling my husband about it, and I must have looked at a dozen compact HP printers but I kept coming back to this one. I do a lot of scrapbooking and this is an absolute must-have if you are into that. The quality of the pics is amazing! So sharp and true to life color!! I took a picture of the ocean and printed it out with a border-I showed my neighbor and she swore it was a postcard....that's just how great this product really is. I was hoping for an LCD screen to see what I was doing, but now that I have the Epson, I found it easier just as well to do all my cropping and picture numbering on my digital camera before I even print so I rarely use an index sheet or cropping feature. I am so shocked at how great this little guy is..price, quality, ease of use, mobility, space saver and simplicity. All I can tell you is that this is the best thing going for your own personal photo lab, you will not regret buying it!!!!