Epson PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition
The PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition is noticeably heavier than its competitors. That's simply because it's the only model that uses six different inks. As with 8½ x 11 / A4 photo printers, light cyan and light magenta inks have been added to the four basic colors (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) to increase the quality of reproduction of light colors and shading.
The results are worth it. Regardless of the type of photo (portraits, seascapes and mountains, etc.), the colors are faithfully reproduced and the resulting prints can match what you get from a pro photo lab. Black-and-white prints were also very good, even if they were a bit short of what HP printers, with their monochrome-specific ink, can put out.
On the performance side, though, this printer is fairly far behind sublimation printers. Printing itself took less than 80 seconds in our testing, which is still a reasonably good time; but the upstream processing times were sometimes quite long if the spooling file for the photo was a large one. Reading pictures from memory cards isn't very fast either - each photo took several seconds to appear on the LCD display. The display itself, though, is the other strong point of the PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition, which measures a big 2.5". The printer's only major weakness is the driver. It is functionally complete, but sometimes had problems reframing shots for borderless printing. You'll need to reframe the image file yourself to get good results when that happens.
Features Connectivity: USB 2.0; Technology: Inkjet; Number of colors: 6; Resolution: 5760 x 1440 dpi; PictBridge: Yes; Memory-card reader: Yes (CompactFlash, SD, MMC, Memory Stick, SM, Microdrive, xD); LCD display: 2.5 inches; Dimensions: 10.0 x 12.0 x 6.4 inches - when open for printing; Paper Sizes : 4 x 6 inches.
