Labs

One of the larger printers on test, the Epson PictureMate comes out tops for ease of use. The wide, flat, ink cartridge slips into the back of the unit and the paper stacks in a hopper to the rear. It connects to your Mac by means of a USB cable, while a flip-down panel to the front hides slots for direct printing from CompactFlash, SD, MMC, SmartMedia, xD and Memory Stick. This is all controlled through an idiot-proof hardware menu that displays on the top-mounted monochrome LCD.

There's also an optional Bluetooth module that allows you to print directly from a mobile phone. Unfortunately, you have to buy Epson's own dongle; we tried plugging in a generic TDK Go Blue, and in doing so managed

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to trigger some kind of cloaking device, as the PictureMate disappeared from all the MacUser mobiles.

Paper comes in 100-sheet packs, along with a cartridge that should outlast the stack. Epson calls this bundle a blank photo pack, and it'll set you back £29.99 - 30p per photo or £6.96 for 24. This sounds expensive, but when you consider you probably only want a quarter of all the prints you send to Snappy Snaps, it levels off fairly well, at about £1.80 per film, without any rejects.

Print times were remarkably consistent. 1MB Jpegs printed by USB took an average of two minutes 20 seconds, 640 x 480 pixel images from a Nokia 7600 sent by Bluetooth took between two minutes two seconds and two minutes 21 seconds, while 352 x 288 pixel snaps from a Sony Ericsson T610i took two minutes 19 seconds, again by Bluetooth. All our tests results averaged out to around an hour for two dozen images, which is somewhat tedious, but the Epson PictureMate can take a big enough paper stack for you to leave it running while you head off and do other things. Results were generally good, with realistic colours and no discernible banding after we had aligned the heads.

Overall, the Epson wins, beating the HP Photosmart 375 largely on account of its lower running costs.