Review of the Sagem Photo Easy 260

£140 www.sagem.com The Sagem Photo Easy 260 is the latest in French company’s Sagem dye sub printer range. This dinky unit has a small 1.8” LCD, which is fairly low resolution compared to some others, but it does allow you to see images before you print. It also accepts all popular camera memory cards, or you connect it via USB to a Mac or Windows PC. Camera phone users can transfer images via Infra Red, or via an optional Bluetooth adapter. Alternatively cameras can also be connected via USB, with PictBridge support. The screen allows you to scroll and zoom images, while a simple interface allows you to selct print quantities and so on. The unit also has a button for Crystal image mode, an auto correction which improves colour, saturation and sharpness. Pressing this button twice will also add a red eye removal option for flash portraits. Sagem quotes a print time of less than 60 seconds for prints; in reality a 6MP image takes a slower 75 minutes, so it’s not the fastest off the blocks in this category. On the positive side it is very easy to use though. In terms of image quality, the thermal dye sub ribbons and paper produce an image resolution of 309.8 x 309.8dpi on 6x4, and the device supports image sizes of up to 12MP and file sizes of up 6MB. Manual adjustments can be made to brightness, colour and so on and there’s also a black and white mode. Results are slightly disappointing, images are slightly flat and lack the punch that some other printers produce. The Crystal image mode improves things marginally, while for best results printing from a PC rather than direct allows more control. At least you can bump up the saturation and contrast a little before you print. Finally at £17 for replacement media and ribbon, the 42p per print is quite steep considering the quality.