The Epson PictureMate Dash is primarily designed for standalone use without a PC, but it can be connected to a PC using the available USB connection. The Epson PictureMate Dash (PM260) stands 13.6 inches wide, 9.1 inches deep, and 8.7 inches tall, and weighs just 5.3 pounds. Although it has traded the all-silver look for a white-and-dark-gray exterior, it retains the high-tech picnic basket look with a pivoting handle and lid. One big improvement over last year’s PictureMate lineup is the huge 3.6-inch LCD that flips up. The onboard control panel consists of a menu button; four direction keys and an OK button for navigating the menus; a zoom button; a thumbnail display key; and stop and start buttons. Because the printer is small, it’s not difficult to turn it around to access the USB port.
The PictureMate Dash comes with enough ink and paper to produce approximately 20 4×6 prints. This cheap printer uses four-color printing, and the ink comes in a single large cartridge that pops into a slot in the back of the printer. The USB drive can be used not only to connect PictBridge cameras, but also flash thumb drives, USB hard drives, and even USB CD/DVD drives. Once an external device is connected, images can be transferred from memory card to the storage device. Photos can also be printed from the storage device.
The feature set on the PictureMate Dash is solid. Compared to similarly priced snapshot printers, the cheap Epson PictureMate Dash is fast, improving on the speeds of the previous generations of PictureMates. It produced 4×6 photos at a rate of 1.42 prints per minute. The print speed of PictureMate Dash’s is also very impressive.