The ES20 is a small printer that sits vertically on a desk ¬ rather than feeding paper back and forth through the printer like most, this one is designed to feed prints up and down. It takes a cartridge of up to 50 sheets internally, rather than having a clip-on cassette holding the paper, which further reduces bulk.

The ES20 comes in ice-white with a cleanly curved top panel that includes a 76mm colour display as well as controls to print and remove red-eye, to add frames or even put speech bubbles on photographs. However, users have to handwrite the contents of the bubbles once they’ve been printed.

Sockets at the bottom of the front panel enable the user to plug in the most common memory cards and compatible cameras, and a USB socket at the rear connects it to a PC.

All prints take about 75 seconds, with those from a camera being slightly quicker than others. This is a good speed, particularly when compared with typical inkjet photo printers. Print quality is fair, though by default colours come through darker than they show up on screen, and may need to be adjusted to achieve a more accurate reproduction.

The ES20 works well, it is simple to use and convenient, but it takes a little work to get the best quality prints out of it.

Distributors: Beta, Computer 2000, headway, Ingram Micro, Interface, Micro Peripherals, Midwich, Nimans, Target, Tekdata, Westcoast