Digital Home Thoughts: Epson PictureMate Dash Review

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:

• Select;
  
• Print Settings;
  
• Edit,
  
• Help;
  
• Save Photos;
  
• Maintenance;
  
• 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.