| I saw this item for sale in a Staples ad - $199.95, before a $50.00 mail-in rebate. I also had a $30.00 coupon I received from Staples. So I decided to try this out - for $119.95 plus tax, why not? The setup was very easy. Pulled all the parts out of the box, then assembled it, which means filling up the paper tray and hooking the paper tray to the printer dock. Then put in the color cartridge, then plug it in. To print just from the camera, you truly do not ever need to turn on any computer. I placed my Kodak CX6200 digital camera (paid $95.00 for this) onto the dock, and in just a few moments I had a printed picture from the camera. Other reviews about the quality of the pictture are true. It looks like a photo lab-developed picture. I am impressed with it so far. Then I hooked it up to my computer (you install a printer driver on your computer, then you can use it with your computer after you hook it up with a USB cable) and printed a picture that I have on my hard drive. The docking station hooks up to your computer via the USB cable of your camera, so if you do not have a digital camera with a USB cable, you will need to get a USB cable to hook it up to your computer (the docking station does NOT come with its own USB cable). Once again, easy to do, and an excellent result. I used the Kodak EasyShare software that came with my camera to select and print the picture from my computer's hard drive. It comes with a starter kit of 10 pages of Kodak photo paper (to print out 4X6 photos), and one printer cartridge. Evidently you can buy refills that have 40 pages of Kodak photo paper and a printer cartridge for about $25.00. This is how you figure about 62 cents per picture ($25.00 divided by 40 = $.625). So overall, this appears to be a "keeper" for me. The retail price ($199.95) is kind of high - but if you can be patient and wait for another rebate to come out, and/or use a coupon like I did from Staples, then you can get this for quite a bit less. And I believe you will like the quality of the prints. |
