Peter's Blog

With my mum's new camera we got a photodock in an attempt to make it dead easy for her to copy photos to her computer.

Bullet point review:

• photodock conforms to 'pictbridge' standard which appears to support multiple camera and dock makers.
• the camera drops onto the top of the dock. It plugs in but with zero resistance.
• the photodock includes a printer that can print 6x4 inch pictures of good quality. When you put the camera in the dock it's screen comes on and you just pick a picture to print using the left and right arrow buttons and then press another button to print it.
• the paper and ink cartridges cost about £28 for 80 prints (I think it was) which is expensive: 35p a print. I can get them printed online for 7p each.
• the dock makes it very easy to copy pictures to a pc. Install the kodak software, plug in usb and it is a simple matter of putting the camera in the dock, the Kodak software fires up and copys the pictures. The kodak software is ok in a dumbed-down kind of way.
• the dock comes with rechargable batteries for the camera and will charge it. They were Ni-mh, which are not as good as lithium ion (memory effects and rapid ageing).

Conclusion: the dock is ok, it makes things easy if you find plugging USB cable too fiddly but the printer is an expensive way to print.

My Mother bought herself a Kodak CX7525 Digital Camera. It seems decent enough, it's 5 megapixel and the picture quality looks very good, no noticable digital noise like the Kodak CX7220 that I bought my mother-in-law for christmas. Other than the resolution and the noise it is very similar to the CX7220.

Potted review:

• smallish screen
• few controls, simple to use
• good picture quality
• flash seems powerful, maybe too powerful, pictures look a bit overexposed.
• AA batteries, always good.
• takes videos etc

It is a very easy camera to use, ideal for mum's.