I bought an external CD-ROM and hooked it up to my Picturemate, which accepted it, but when disc full of jpegs was loaded, got error "cannot read this card."

I contacted Epson and a tech told me some media was not compatible, but after research, said he didn't know which would work and which would not.

Any ideas for a solution?

Yea, buy a Canon, or HP.

Epson service sucks, they don't care about their customers.

See this post. Epson Sues Medea