Epson PictureMate Dash Review [Archive]

Chris Baxter

12-19-2007, 04:00 PM

<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/baxter-dash-figure0.jpg" /> Product Category: Portable Photo Printer Manufacturer: <a href="http://www.epson.com">Epson</a> Where to Buy: <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/digitalmediathoughts-20/detail/B000UMRWCC/104-8147914-2239126">Amazon.com</a> [Affiliate] Price: $99.99 USD System Requirements: If connected to a computer the Dash requires 256MB of RAM, 300MB of hard disk space, and a USB port. The included software supports Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and MAC OS 10.2.8 or greater. Specifications: Size: W:9.1" D:6.5" H:9.9", Size when printing: W:9.1" D:13.6" H:10.5", Weight: 5.3 lbs. Pros: <li>Prints 4"x6" BorderFree pictures without the need to be connected to a computer; <li>Supports a wide variety of memory cards; <li>Light weight and small size make it easily portable. Cons: <li>Only prints 4"x6" pictures; <li>Paper feeder only holds 20 sheets at time. Summary: The Holidays are here and that means pictures - lots and lots of pictures. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to make prints of some of the pictures on the spot so you could hand them out to loved ones? Also, wouldn’t it be nice to easily make 4"x6" prints of the family picture that you want to send out with the Christmas cards without a bunch of hassle? Well if these scenarios appeal to you then Epson has a printer you might want to check out. The Epson PictureMate Dash is a small, lightweight photo printer that you can take anywhere and does not need to be attached to a PC to print your pictures. It even has the ability to perform simple edits and enhancements to your pictures on the fly. Impressed? I was when I read the list of what all this little printer is capable of. Did I remain impressed? Read on for the full review! <!> This, That, and the Other Thing At first glance the Epson PictureMate Dash looks like a small plastic box with a handle. In a world of hi-tech gadgetry and futuristic designs, the Dash is not an impressive looking device, but let’s be real here, it’s a printer, and who buys a printer based on its looks? Weighing in it at 5 lbs., about half the weight of a standard ink jet printer, the Dash is a little heavier than I would have expected for something as small as it is. But when you pick it up by its handle the weight is hardly noticeable. In fact here is where that box-like design really shines, the weight is so well distributed along the handle that carrying it is like a second thought. The design really lends itself to portability. <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/baxter-dash-figure01.jpg" /> Figure 1: The Epson PictureMate Dash - A box with a handle that turns into a printer. The Epson PictureMate Dash comes with the following included in the box: <li>CD-ROM with printer drivers and bonus photo software; <li>“Quick Start” poster; <li>“Basics” booklet; <li>20 sheets of glossy 4”x6” PictureMate Photo Paper; <li>PictureMate Photo Cartridge; <li>Power Supply. What's this? It comes with a CD-ROM that includes printer drivers and bonus photo software? Isn’t one of the points of this printer to not be attached to a computer? While the Dash can operate without the use of a computer, it can still be attached to one via USB cable. The reason for doing this would be to take advantage of the more powerful imaging software that a PC can run. The “Quick Start” poster is nothing new, seems like everything comes with them these days. Remember the good old days when anything you bought came with a nicely printed and important looking manual? Well those days are long past. For most products these days you have to either look to an included CD-ROM for the manual or download it off of the manufacturer’s website. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand the reasoning, it saves money and trees not to print manuals for products, but I still miss the thrill of knowing that I bought something complex and cool because it has a big manual. Instead of the big manual, which can be found on Epson’s website by the way, you get a small booklet entitled “Basics”. In all fairness for not being a big full blown manual, the Basics booklet does cover most things you would want to do with the printer, which is impressive given that this is actually a booklet instead of a book. Epson also throws in 20 sheets of Photo Paper and a Photo cartridge that is good for about twenty prints. Twenty prints seems kind of useless to me when you consider that you can waste them all just learning how to use the printer. I think it would have been nice for Epson to have thrown in a full Print Pack to get people started. <PAGEBREAK> What Doesn't Come With the Dash Now that we have taken a look at what comes with the printer, why not take a look at what doesn’t. Face it - no technology gadget is ever complete without those pesky little things called accessories and the Dash is no exception to this rule. First up is the Epson PictureMate Print Pack, which comes in two flavors, matte or glossy. The Print Pack is kind of a new concept to me and one that I kind of like. Instead of buying your ink and paper separately, it's bundled together. The Glossy Print Pack comes with 150 sheets of glossy 4”x6” photo paper and a photo cartridge. The Matte Print Pack comes with 100 sheets of matte photo paper and a photo cartridge. The photo cartridge life tends to mirror the amount of paper included, so when you run out of paper, a new photo cartridge is most likely needed as well. So instead of having to replace everything separately you can just replace it all at the same time. The Picture Packs seem to be priced reasonably also. The Glossy Print Pack retails at $39.99 and the Matte Print Pack retails at $34.99. Next in the line of accessories is the optional Internal Battery. Yup, even though it's advertised as a portable printer, a rechargeable battery can only be had if you buy it separately. Honestly the lack of an included rechargeable battery does bug me a little considering this printer is supposed to be portable, but I can get over it because I really can’t see myself in a situation where I would need to print photos and not be able to find a wall jack somewhere. Still, it’s nice all the same that the option exists. The internal battery supports printing for about 140 photos or 5-6 hours of LCD viewing time. Unfortunnately I was unable to test this because a battery was not included with the review unit that I was sent. The battery retails at $49.99. Other accessories include a carrying case and a Bluetooth adapter. The carrying case, which retails at $34.99, is a water resistant case designed to carry and protect the Dash and its accessories. Finally, there's the Epson Bluetooth Photo Print Adapter, which lets you print wirelessly from devices that have Bluetooth support, such as cell phones and PDAs. The Bluetooth adapter goes for about $39. <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/baxter-dash-figure02.jpg" /> Figure 2: Epson PictureMate Dash Picture Pack. Putting It Through Its Paces Ok, now for the good stuff, what exactly is this printer capable of? Well according to the documentation that I received with my review unit, it can print borderless 4”x6” photos in just 37 seconds. Well I decided to put this to the test. I also decided to test how well it handled large print jobs, the overall quality of the prints, and how easy it is to operate out of the box. The Dash supports JPEG files or uncompressed TIFF files with resolutions ranging from 80x80 to 9200x9200 pixels. It accepts most of the memory formats used by digital cameras, such as SD, MMC, xD, Memory Stick, and CompactFlash to name a few. You can also attach a camera, external hard drive, or flash drive via the USB port located on the back of the printer. To get started I inserted an SD memory card with sample photos on it. On the top of the printer are botha 3.6” LCD screen and the controls for the printer. The controls consist of several buttons, including Power, Menu, Back, Zoom, Display, Stop/Clear, and Print. Using the four-way directional pad that's located in the middle of the buttons, I was easily able to select and print the photos I wanted. The selection process also allows you to determine the number of prints you want of each photo. The resulting prints looked great. This is impressive because for my first round of prints I had left all the printer settings at default. To test the speed of the printing, I timed six separate prints using different photos of varying degrees of complexity. Epson’s claim of 37 seconds per print was spot on. Out of the six, four took exactly 37 seconds to print, one took 36 seconds to print, and one took 38 seconds to print. Next I inserted an SD card with 60 of my photos on it, selected them all, and hit the print button. Here is where I ran into an interesting issue, the paper feed tray of this printer only accepts 20 sheets at a time. So I ended up having to reload the paper three times during my 60-photo-print. While this was kind of annoying, the speed with which it prints and the quality of those prints made up for it. Sacrifices must be made to make a printer this small. Other than having to reload the paper three times, it handled the 60 prints like a champ, never missing a beat. After this and a battery of similar tests that I performed, I must say that I am quite impressed with the printer overall. <PAGEBREAK> Menus and Options Now let’s take a little deeper look into the Menu button and what it means for photo editing and printing features. When the menu button is pressed, a menu pops up on the LCD screen with the following options: <li>Select; <li>Print Settings; <li>Edit, <li>Help; <li>Save Photos; <li>Maintenance; <li>Setup. The first option on the Menu is Select. Select gives you further options for how to select the photos you want to print. You can use it to select all the photos on a memory card as well as sort them by date. The date function is handy; I used it to select all my Christmas photos from last year. Plus if your digital camera supports Digital Print Order Format, the Dash can use that to determine print order and number of copies. Next up, we have the Print Settings option which lets you select different options that affect the way your photos print. Under this option you can choose different layouts for your photos, tell the printer to fix photos automatically using preset options such as Enhance or Print Image Matching, insert a Date Stamp, or add text. Enhance even has further options under it such as Standard, Night Scene, and others. After doing some testing with these options I came to the conclusion that the Standard Enhancement seemed to work best for most photos. The Print Setting option really seems geared toward using quick fix features and making automatic enhancements. If you really want to get down and dirty with your photos, the Edit option is for you. It gives you the ability to do things like rotate a picture, apply color effects, reduce red-eye, and decorate a photo with small fun images and borders. The Edit option also allows you to adjust the brightness, saturation, and sharpness of the picture manually. One feature not under the Edit option, but I think should be mentioned here is the ability to crop pictures. Using the Zoom button on the top of the printer and the direction pad you can zoom into the area you want to crop. Once there, a crop option appears that you can use by pressing the OK button in the center of the direction pad. Now, obviously these simple options can’t compete with a PC for raw photo editng horsepower, but they are more than adequate for little adjustments and enhancements that might need to be made to your photos. The rest of the options are pretty self explanatory. Help gives you quick and simple instructions on how to do maintenance and use the printer. Save Photos allows you so save the photos to another device. Maintenance has options for checking the ink nozzles, auto cleaning, head alignment, and Print Pack Status. Performing a head alignment is important when you change photo cartridges so that you can get the best possible quality out of your prints. Last but not least is the Setup option which allows you to fine tune certain general printer options as well as run a slideshow from the pictures that are currently loaded. Conclusions The Epson PictureMate Dash is a great little printer for what it does. The 4”x6” prints it creates are high quality and it's simple to use. It’s small enough to take along with you wherever you go, but at the same time powerful enough to produce large quantities of great looking photos. I like the Print Pack concept; it’s convenient and fairly priced. I think that given the nature of the printer, the rechargeable battery should have been included but that's just me being nitpicky. With a retail price of $99 it’s most certainly not the cheapest photo printer on the market especially given the fact that it only prints in one size. But when you weigh in that it’s easily portable where most printers are not, does not need a PC connection, and does an excellent job at printing what it's designed to print, the price does not seem that unreasonable. If you're in the market for a printer that makes high speed 4”x6” prints and is portable I suggest that you check this printer out. Chris Baxter is an IT Professional and part time Web Designer who resides in North Aurora, Illinois. Playing video games, watching movies, or reading a good book are what occupies his time when he is not fixing computers or trying to get his hands on the latest gadgets.