Kodak Personal Picture Maker 200

WHAT'S HOT: Kodak's PPM-200 is designed for digital-camera fans: This Lexmark-manufactured printer offers embedded card slots that let it read the popular CompactFlash and SmartMedia digital-camera storage media. Using a few buttons and the 1.8-inch color LCD screen that pivots for working seated or standing, you can select and print photos stored on your cards without attaching the printer or the camera to a PC. The on-screen menus let you crop or rotate images, print several photos on one page, add a border, and even superimpose text.

WHAT'S NOT: The PPM-200 comes with only a USB port--no parallel port. USB may be a superior technology, but millions of people still operate viable PCs without it. The PPM-200 prints everyday documents very slowly: Text scrolls out at a painful 2.4 pages per minute, and simple graphics at 0.3 ppm. And the LCD is bright enough but so small that reading the menus can be tough.

WHAT ELSE: The PPM-200's print quality is acceptable but not outstanding. On plain paper, it prints slightly grayish text and somewhat gritty gray-scale images, and its color graphics show a lot of detail but appear a bit too dark. It includes another feature for working without a PC: You can attach a Zip drive to the printer to dump photos from your CompactFlash or SmartMedia card onto a Zip disk and free up space on the card for more pictures. Kodak also supplies PicturePage, a program for cleaning up photos, annotating them with text and sound, and displaying them in templates.

BEST USE: The Personal Picture Maker 200 is easy to use and offers comprehensive photo printing capabilities, but slow performance and middling print quality on other kinds of documents make it less than ideal for serving double-duty as an all-purpose printer.

SUMMARY

Kodak Personal Picture Maker 200 Rated 4.0 ppm monochrome/1.0 ppm color, 1200-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, 100 sheets input, 50 sheets output. $229 800/235-6325 www.kodak.com