Epson Picturemate Deluxe Photo Printer Review & Its True Cost of Ownership

Epson Picturemate Deluxe offers fast and easy photo printing, editing and printing at home or office. You can print your photos on glossy 4×6 paper. With this photo printer, it is a quick process to make a direct printing from any PictBridge compatible digital camera and memory cards, and you don’t need a PC. You can view your images in clear details on its photo viewer. Epson Picturemate Deluxe lacks an adapter for mini SD cards.

This is truly a very good medium level photo printer. Here are some of the important specifications and features (and my comments) of Epson Picturemate Deluxe:

* There are a lot of image options, including mini-wallets, fun Disney borders, and Borderless

* Premium 2.4-inch photo viewer for selecting and editing photos makes the selecting and printing of the photo pretty good

* Direct photo printing from popular digital camera memory cards without a PC with memory slots of all sizes

* It uses the Advanced Micro-Piezo ink jet print technology that is optimized for photo printing

* Up to 5,760 x 1,440 color dpi resolution which is more than any normal home user would probably need

* Printer supports CompactFlash Type I and II, Secure Digital (SD), MMC, Memory Stick (including PRO, Duo, MagicGate), SmartMedia, Microdrive xD-Picture Card

* ContrastPLUS 5-color ink system; built-in two-sided printing (again great for a home printer, you probably will not use it a lot but still is good to have)

* Printer ink cartridges: T5570 ink cartridge (6 Color) (PrintPack)

Here what comes in the regular box: Epson PictureMate Deluxe printer, power cable, starter PictureMate photo printer ink cartridge, 20 sheets of PictureMate Photo Paper, CD-ROM, user guides; Epson Software Film Factory (PC and Macintosh compatible, P.I.M. and Exif Print-enabled0029

The street price of this printer ranges between $175 and $250 but this is only a part of the story as we all know. It is the supplies that will make the bulk of the cost of ownership.
With Epson PictureMate deluxe, printer supplies cost seems to be reasonable with OEM cartridge being about $35. There are also quality compatible cartridges that you can use for about only $12 or so.

Now lets calculate the true cost of ownership (per month) of this printer. This is how we calculate cost of ownership of a printer: “number of prints per month” times “cost of the printer cartridge” divided by “the yield of the printer cartridge”.

For example, lets assume that you will print 20 photos per month using this printers ink cartridge set that yields about 20 photos and a set of cartridges cost $35 for the genuine Epson brand ink cartridges. The monthly “cost of ownership” is then

(20 photos) x ($35) / 20 pages = $35 / month. A little pricey, but if you were using the Epson compatible replacement cartridges (good quality ones exist and comparable to OEMs unless you are in professional photography printing of course), the cost of ownership would be a much more reasonable of about $12 / month with the same formula.