Editor: Nigel Woodford

Author: Scott Piercy

Manufacturer: Kodak

Model: Kodak Easyshare 5300

Price: $199 

It's probably no secret to anyone that emulsion film based camera's are more or less being shunned by the public. With the notable exception of professional photographers, some of whom have specific needs not met by digital cameras, most consumers are more than happy with the quality and flexibility found in modern digital photography. Having said that people still want hard copy prints, and here is where your options erode the flexibility of digital photography by adding additional complexity or cost.

In the modern home, inkjet printer's dominate consumer offerings. Significant evolutionary improvements in quality and speed have taken place with ink jet print technology, but it's still a bit on the expensive side to do volume photo printing at home. Though the types of paper used plays a big role in the overall costs, the biggest reason behind high costs are ink cartridges. It's not out of the ordinary to pay more for a set of new ink cartridges for a printer, than a new printer would cost!

Kodak's recent launch of their Easyshare series of printers is slated to change this paradigm significantly. All of the Easyshare series of printers, the 5100, 5300, and 5500 (the top model, the 5500 will be released in June) use the same black and color-photo ink cartridges. Through Kodak's development of a new type of MEMS print head which is separate from the cartridges (unlike most of it's competitors), they have been able to aggressively price their cartridges at $9.99 and $14.99 respectively. To say this is significantly cheaper than the competition is an understatement. Not only that, they are offering aggressive bundling deals on photo cartridges with photo paper. Does a color cartridge and 135 sheets of their premium 4x6 color photo paper for $19.99 sound good? How about 180 sheets of their standard 4x6 color photo paper along with a color cartridge for $17.99? Sure sounds good to us. Doing the math this works out to an overall cost of 10-15 cents a print! Kodak's is so serious about this strategy, that they've done things like this...

(note: For a laugh you might even want to visit Kodak's "Viral" marketing site InkIsIt.com. It is so horrendously lame it's actually kind of funny.) 

The silliness doesn't stop there. They've created a tray application, called InkTracker, which is freely available for download. Once installed this application monitors your printer, and generates estimates of printing costs over time. Though this is based on averages, it is calibrated for the specified printing costs for most consumer printers. Since this is after all a Kodak application, take it's results with a grain of salt. Still it is no shock to the average consumer that ink cartridges are expensive, and this little software strategy of Kodak's might help drive home the obviousness of it all. You can download it here from there InkIsIt.com website.
 
You may have noticed that some newer model printers from the competition are indeed coming out with newer and less expensive ink cartridges. Just as a random sample, and with no intent to deride Hewlett Packard, their HP 21 Black cartridge (for HP Deskjet 3940 and 3920 Printers, and HP PSC 1400 All-in-One Printer) is a modestly affordable ~$15-17 depending on where you shop. Of course this cartridge only comes with 5ml of black ink, while Kodak's $9.99 cartridge has 10ml. Though you cannot make a direct correlation here, because we don't know at what exact rates both cartridges use up ink, it doesn't take an economics major to figure out your paying about 3 times as much per ml for HP's ink.

All of this is fine and dandy, and certainly sounds like it has the potential to rock the consumer printing market to it's foundations. This essentially changes the business model in printing, which currently revolves around the concept of "sell a cheap printer, have consumers buy expensive ink, cash big fat dividend checks", which is similar to how the razor blade business works. Still, a lot of good all this does if the printer itself sucks right? Well, that's what we're here for... 

Let's move on and take a peek at the printer's specifications, then we'll move on and take a look at the actual printer itself.