Digital format has taken over the photography segment in a big way. There is a wide variety of digital cameras available in a vast price range. With digital photography getting popular, photo printer and digital photo frames have also seen a surge in demand. With the EPSON PM310, the company has joined two categories?photo printer and digital photo frame?into one.
The PM 310 looks like a large make-up box with a huge 7? touchscreen display fixed in the front. The device has various memory card slots through which photos can be printed directly. These include SD/MS PRO/xD and CF. There is also a USB slot that can be used to plug in hard disk drives and flash drives. The beautiful 7? display screen has a sliding mechanism allowing it to be tilted upwards. The overall design is neat with a handle at the top along with the paper tray.
Coming to the prints, the print quality is great. The printer accepts photo paper with a maximum size of 4 x 6? or maybe lower than that. The output is excellent with natural colours and sharp details. It took an average one minute and 33 seconds to print a 4×6 borderless photo with high settings. Interestingly, the device has no buttons on its body frame. The user has to interact via touch screen and the bundled remote control instead.
The interface of the device is interesting and very well laid. It is easy to use, but has limited features when compared to a basic digital photo frame. The interface offers various effects that can be added to the pictures before printing. Editing options include crop, rotate, red eye removal and colour effects. The learning curve is simple, thanks to the large menu icons and easy-to-use procedures. The interface offers options to print two, four, eight or 16 photos on a single sheet of paper.
The display screen doubles up as a digital photo frame using the slide show feature. There are various effects that can be added to the slide show, such as spin, cross fade, zoom in and fade in. There is also an option to add background scenes, say books, museum, penguin story, fashion show, clock 1, 2 and 3 and calendar. The device also lets the user save all the photos from one device to another using the photo storage option. It boasts of Bluetooth and PictBridge interface for printing.
Compared to a standard digital photoframe, there are many features that are missing in the device, such as video playback, audio playback, etc. If we look at the printer, the images have great print quality and the device prints without any hassle. Currently available for a price of Rs 15,000 in the market, the Epson device proves to be a much better option than the Canon Selphy ES3 which comes for Rs 13,990 with a 3.5? screen.
? CyberMedia http://www.LD2.in Mail: talkLD@cybermedia.co.in