Review of the Kodak EasyShare Printer Dock Series 3

You’ve bought a Kodak EasyShare camera, burned photo discs of your pictures and shared them online with friends and family. Now you want “hard copy” pictures to put in an album, but your regular printer just isn’t going to cut it. Kodak offers a solution: printer docks. You place your digital camera of the correlating series onto the printer dock, after loading the paper. Tag the picture(s) to be printed and then simply press the print button. The dock retails for $130, not including paper. What is going to give you better pictures at the lower price? Have your photo disc developed in a department store, such as Sam’s Club, or buying the printing dock?

What’s great about this printer dock is that it automatically detects the pictures you’ve taken and will upload to your computer at the touch of a button. The dock also recharges your digital camera in approximately 3.5 hours, saving you some batteries. It comes with ten sheets of IMAGELINK photo paper and Kodak Color Cartridge. It also comes with a 24V AC adapter,USB cable, and Kodak EasyShare software with printer drivers. Another great thing about the EasyShare line is that their products are ready to go right out of the box. You also have 4 different picture size settings to choose from. The printer dock is compatible with Kodak EasyShare-One and Z Series digital cameras.

The EasyShare printer dock, and the entire line of EasyShare, is made to be so simple that a child could operate it. It’s well-designed and uncomplicated. The pictures are stunning and take 60-90 (depending on model) to print. Lamination provides a special protective coating. They look just like they came from a photo lab. They are 4 x 6 in size, waterproof, stain-resistant and last a lifetime. The quality is great. Here’s the “but” – the paper is very expensive. 40 sheets will cost you $15.99, 80 are $39.99, and 160 run $46.99. In the long run, you’ll lose a lot of money on the printer dock simply because of the overpriced paper. To illustrate, most photo labs charge 0.15 to 0.20 cents per photo. You could have 100 photos printed from a photo lab and it would cost you approximately $20, as opposed to buying 40 sheets for the Kodak EasyShare printer dock at $15.99. One hundred and thirty dollars is not a lot for what the dock can do, but at the same time it is like throwing your money away.