Labs

In order to consolidate Kodak's photo-imaging business it's teamed up with Lexmark to produce the Personal Picture Maker 200. Otherwise known as the PPM200, this photo printer has the virtue of printing directly from two common types of flash media used in digital cameras: CompactFlash and SmartMedia. This means that a PC isn't required, although it can connect to one if necessary.

The HP Photosmart 1218 can also print directly from flash media, but the PPM200 holds the advantage of an LCD colour display. The panel measures 36 « 28mm (W « H), so it's fairly small in size, but adequate to view thumbnails of images read directly from flash media. The panel also acts as a display menu to give options for print setup, paper settings, cleaning and aligning inkjet heads. In terms of ease of operation the PPM200 is about as user-friendly as it gets.

Despite

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using a Lexmark engine, the PPM200 is restricted to a maximum resolution of 1,200 « 1,200 compared to a higher 2,400 « 1,200 from the Z42 and Z52. In order to deal with direct input of big image files, the PPM200 has a large buffer memory of 10Mb, which is only beaten by the HP Photosmart 1218's 16Mb. Partially because of this, an A4 sheet of 25 thumbnail images took the PPM200 14 minutes to output, compared to a much speedier four minutes from the Photosmart.

We hooked up the PPM200 via USB to our test rig PC to see how it would perform as a connected device. Putting it through the 25-page text-only test, not a task for which it's intended, it took a leisurely one and a half hours. This made it the slowest printer in this category by far. Moving on to the CorelDRAW single-page test, we were stunned to find that colour registration was wrong. This was particularly evident from the grey feathers, which were output as a light shade of brown. This mismatch of grey for brown was also evident in our colour performance test printed on coated paper.

As a consequence of this colour mismatch, the photo image output was also poor. Highly visible banding detracted from the photo quality as well. This is all particularly disappointing, as the PPM200 is supposedly designed precisely for printing photos. True, the PPM200 makes photo printing simple thanks to the LCD display, but until it can match this with quality and speed we can't recommend it.