Peter's Blog

Tried using my mum's Kodak Photodock to print some photo's, thus avoiding the hassle of ordering prints online: if I only want one picture I don't have to pay £1.50 postage. Tried changing the ink cartridge and the printer refused to release it. Tried unscrewing and fiddling but it still wouldn't come out. Went online and kodak's troubleshooting faq said that with these symptoms it should be sent back to Kodak for repair.

So I bought a Canon CP510, a basic 6x4 inch photo printer in Jessops. The reviews I had read told me that the print quality was very good and apparently the prints will last for 100 years. I hate inkjet printers, cheap and nasty things and the ink cartridges always need replacing and cheap clone cartridges always have at least one blocked jet. Yuk. Hence this 'dye sublimation' thing. I also like Canon, my canon scanner and laser printer have served me well.

The CP510 is a basic model, it doesn't have an LCD display or memory card slots, it is designed to print either from a pc or directly from a camera (it has a retractable usb cable). The more expensive models have more features for printing without a pc but I am unlikely to use these.

When I got it out the box I was perturbed to see that it was obviously the same technology and mechanism as the kodak. Looking through the troubleshooting faq it didn't mention the problem I had with the kodak so hopefully they have fixed it.

I printed some photo's out and was disappointed with the results. The resolution was fine but the pictures were muddy, the colours dull. I fiddled with the settings a bit, increasing brightness, contrast and saturation but I didn't get results that were anywhere near as good as prints I get from photobox. The paper has two tear-off stubs at either end and when you hold the finished print you can feel the perforations and it is irrationally annoying.

On the whole I must say I am disappointed with it. It is ok for knocking out quick prints but for populating photo albums I would prefer to use photobox.

My favourite Photo Album software, Picasa now supports my favourite online printing service, Photobox. This means I can upload from Picasa directly to Photobox where I currently have 400M of storage available. Every time I order more prints I get 50M more storage.

I would happily abandon Jasc Paintshop Photo Album but it still provides two useful functions for me:

• it is the default application for importing images from my camera. Maybe picasa can do this, I haven't tried, another job for my todo list.
• PSPA supports drag and drop of pictures to other applications like a file manager. This way I can use it with the flickr uploader. With picasa you cannot drag and drop outside the application, a flaw in my opinion. As picasa is owned by google and flickr is owned by yahoo I cannot see flickr support in picasa coming any time soon.

I use the photobox storage as a backup for personal photos and flickr to show off pictures of my daughter.

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.

Played some more with Flickr and I am rather impressed with it. I have tried two or three photo upload sites and this is by far the best. I have tried:

• Epson online site. Neglected this for months now.
• Drupal image module, i.e. this.
• Photobox private archive. This is where I get my prints done and they give me 50M more space with every order. I'm up to 250M. My photo archive on my laptop is 1G.

Compared with the above Flickr offers a lot more features and, although it has adverts it is not blatantly trying to sell prints. This is important to me if I want to let friends or relatives look around. It just seems rude for each picture to have price tags on it.

Flickr highlights:

• Drag-and-drop windows upload utility. I can drag photo's from Paintshop Photo Album onto this and upload them, easy, cool. Ease of uploading is important: PPA displays the images clearly and I drag them to upload them. Much better than fiddling with the file open dialog box.
• Organizr utility, an online version of Paintshop pro Photo Album. This is java or flash or something and is quite well done, more like a windows app than a web app.
• Calender organisation.
• Post from email, including mobile phone.
• Anyone in the world can see my pictures and that is cool.

Flickr is free up to 10Mbytes per month and only displays your last 100 pictures. Upgrade to 1G/month and limitless pictures is $40 a year.

I do recommend Photobox for prints: they come in a day or two and the quality is superb: they make 'photo-quality' inkjet photos look very poor.