Easyshare Photo Printer 300

[Honorato Winkel]

Kodaks EasyShare printers are among the most popular 4x6 printers on the market. But until the EasyShare Photo Printer 500, they were primarily of interest to owners of Kodak digicams, who could dock their cameras on the printer to get 4x6 prints.

With the $199.95 EasyShare Photo Printer 500 the convenience of EasyShare printing has been unthethered from a Kodak digicam. The 8-in-1 card reader and the large LCD accommodate every format except Smart Media. And you can even connect PictBridge digicams or USB pen drives to the 500 -- or print wirelessly to it, too.

The documentation that comes with the 500 is not extensive and, unfortunately, support at Kodak's Web site is minimal, although you can download both the driver software and firmware. This review, happily, covers those operational tidbits that are hard to find otherwise.

Prints from the 500 are continuous tone, not screened as on any inkjet, using dye diffusion thermal transfer (photo dye sub) at 300 dpi. These aren't your inkjet's dpi, though, because the density of each dot is variable (somewhat like your monitor's pixels). These are dot-free prints.

Dye sub printing uses a heating element to heat dye impregnated in a ribbon to over 350 degrees, at which point it turns into a gas and migrates into the surface of the specially coated photo paper. Temperature controls how much dye transfers at any point on the paper.

In addition to yellow, cyan and magenta dyes, the ribbon contains a clear coating, which Kodak calls XtraLife Lamination, to protect the dyes from UV light and waterproof them, sealing the dyes into the paper.

That's particularly true if your photo project requires handling the photo. If, for example, you want to mount your images on something like Strathmore's Photo Mount Cards with double-sided tape, a dye sub print won't show any evidence of handling.

Except supplies, of course. The EasyShare printers all use the same media, a color ribbon cartridge and sheets of 4x6 print paper (slightly larger to feed through the printer, with perforated tearoff tabs at each end). Three quantities are available: 40 sheets for $19.95 (50 cents a print), 80 sheets for $32.95 (41 cents a print) and 160 sheets for $42.95 (27 cents a print), each with sufficient cartridges to print them all. You can beat the per print price at most fotofinishers (online and brick-and-mortar) and other dye subs (like the Hi-Ti printers) do better on supplies. Twenty cents a print seems to be the sweet spot. But the 160-sheet kit isn't unreasonable and the material ages well.

Weighing 2.1 pounds and taking up just 12.17x7.40x3.27 inches space with the tray installed, the 500 qualifies as a small printer, nearly identical in size to the s3. With the tray removed, the two pieces are about as bulky as a hefty hardback, small enough to pack in a camera bag and bring along to the party. A plastic door protects the interior from dust, even though the slot in the rear remains exposed.

The top of the printer is, for once, not occupied by a docking area. Instead, the folding 3.5-inch LCD, hinged at the back, lays face down on the top panel. Lifting it up reveals four buttons: the Menu, Rotate, Slide Show and Crop buttons.

On the front edge of the top panel, the four-way navigator rings the Print button. To the left of that are the Cancel button and the Bluetooth status light. To the right of the navigator are the Red-Eye Reduction button and the Transfer button.

The front of the 500 has a thin media card reader with slots for CompactFlash and SD/MMC/Memory Stick/xD cards with a status light, and separately an SDIO card slot and status light (so you can use the printer wirelessly and still read SD/MMC cards). Below that is the paper tray door. The door flaps freely when released, so be careful when you move the printer with the tray installed that you don't break the hinge when you put it down.

On the back at the top right corner are the power connector and, just left of it, the USB connector for cable connections to a computer. A cooling vent occupies most of the real estate, but just below it there's a slot for the paper to slip through during printing.

The paper tray itself is a two-piece plastic tray that is not meant to be taken apart. Instead, you slide its cover back one or two clicks, depending on what you want to do. In the closed position, the clear cover protects the print paper. Slide it back one click to open the tray for printing and back another to load it with paper. There are feet under the tray to position it at just the right height to slip into the printer.

Place the printer where it has about five inches clear behind it for the paper to travel as its being printed. You'll also need room on the side to replace the ribbon cartridge, but you can lift the printer to do that. With a dye sub especially, it's wise to avoid high traffic areas where dust could easily get into the printer. And keep it out of direct sun, too -- you don't want the cartridge to get any warmer than 85 degrees.

Second, get media. Load the ribbon cartridge and the paper tray. First take up any slack in the ribbon by rotating the full spool in the reverse direction. Then slip the cartridge into the side of the printer until it clicks into place. Open the paper tray by sliding the top back. It doesn't lift off but provides enough clearance to slip the paper in. Fan the paper without touching the glossy surface and slip it into the paper tray facing up. Then slide the tray cover back to its closed position. There is a fill line to observe but the standard paper pack fits just fine. With the cover pulled back one click, slide the tray into the printer.

That's all you have to do to print without a computer. But to print directly from your computer, install the software before connecting the two devices with a USB cable. That way the computer can find the drivers when it sees the printer is attached.

To use the 500 wirelessly, you use the printer utility program installed with the driver to create profiles for it that are stored in the printer. There are two possible profiles, Primary and Secondary, which you can rename. You can share the printer with any networked computer on which you've installed its driver. That is a very nice feature -- you can print 4x6 prints from any computer on your network.

Although the Configuration Utility includes a Wizard to step you through the process, no magic is really necessary. After optionally renaming the profile, there are just four steps (screen shots from our s3 review):

This information is stored in the printer and can be confirmed using the Menu button under the WiFi option or when you print out a test sheet by holding down the Print and Transfer buttons for five seconds.

The s3 handled network WiFi printing and WiFi printing from the EasyShare One digicam effortlessly. The nice thing about that is you can put the printer any where you like. We took it to whichever room we were taking pictures and during a lull in the action, printed a few and passed them around.

We were able to create and store the profiles on the printer, but the printer failed to respond to actual print requests. Our contact at Kodak wasn't able to isolate this to either a hardware or firmware failure, but we suspect it's isolated to this printer.

Kodak recommends setting up your camera to use its 3:2 aspect ratio setting, which is the aspect ratio of a 4x6 print. Using a 3:2 aspect ratio, your images won't require cropping at any of the sizes the s3 can print.

Find some pictures to print! You can deliver images to the printer from a USB drive, media cards or a PictBridge compatible camera. Flip up the LCD, press the Power button on and connect the device with the images on it.

With the optional WiFi card installed in the SD slot, you can print from any computer on your network that has the s3 driver installed or from the EasyShare-One WiFi digicam. To print from a computer, you simply select the printer as you would any other to be the active computer and use your application's Print command. Printing from the One is covered in our EasyShare One Diary.

The Menu System. The 500 packs a few editing features and printing utilities under its hood, too. And with the large LCD, they make it easy to enhance images stored on the card. Here are a few improvements:

"No matter how many times I fanned and fluffed the stack of paper," Dave reported, "by the time three or four prints had been made, enough static charge built up on the remaining paper that the sheets wanted to stick together. Once jammed, there seemed to be no graceful way to clear the jam, short of forcefully yanking the paper out the back. Eventually, this forcible removal of jammed paper seems to have shifted a shaft encoder (my interpretation of the symptoms), such that the printer now thinks that the paper is clear of the mechanism and all is ready for the next print when a sheet of paper is actually projecting halfway out the back.

What makes Kodak's EasyShare printers special are the added features. The card reader with support for everything but Smart Media is the 500's big attraction. The LCD Menu system provides rudimentary but useful image enhancements and editing, but it's real role is showing you what will print.But the 500 is also a compelling addition to your wireless network, providing a 4x6 photo printer to anyone on your network. And its small size and independent nature mean it can tag along with the camera (even an ordinary PictBridge-enabled one), not the computer.

I have a Kodak easyshare printer dock series 3, and I would like to print with it using ubuntu. I looked on the OEM website but did not find a driver.when I plugged it in, Ubuntu messaged me that the appropriate driver was not found. Is there support anywhere for this device as a photo printer?

In printer add, when I was presented with the option for generic (recommended),I instead went to: Kodak, and looked in there. I saw a generic option for Kodak+GutenPrint, and a listing for the "easyshare printer dock".I selected these things, and it prints fine photos now.

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