Kodak G600
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Details at a glance
Printing: Dye sub
Max Paper Size: 10 x 15cm
Resolution: 4800x1200
Dim: 198 x 103 x 331mm
Weight: 1.9kg
We clicked with
Great prints that look good and are pretty indestructible, fast - a 6X4 takes just over a minute, portable with the optional battery
Shots in the dark
Questionable print performance in dark areas, fiddly to use as stand alone printer, curled prints
Links
More Kodak information
www.kodak.co.uk
Price Comparison:
Kodak G600
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Hot on the heels of the Lexmark G600 comes the Kodak G600 printer dock. On first sight this may appear to be a similar printer but the technology is completely different - the Lexmark is an inkjet and the Kodak is a dye sub. Oh and it's a “dock” too.
Appearance and features
The G600 is a dye sublimation printer. This is completely different technology from inkjet but is very straightforward for the user. It's also easy to work out exactly what a print costs you because you buy a pack of paper and special ribbon that lasts exactly as long as the number of sheets of paper. Paper is fed through the printer a total of 4 times - 3 for the colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) and once for a clear coat that seals the picture in. The only thing you need to remember is not to panic when a completely yellow print comes out on the first pass!
If you've used a dye sub printer before then the G600 will look fairly standard to you. It's a smallish squarish printer with a paper tray on the front. There's a dock on top for you to connect a Kodak camera and a few buttons for standalone mode.
You can print pictures from your camera or from any USB device attached to the socket on the side. This could be used for a card reader, USB thumb drive or even an external hard drive. There is no screen on this printer - to use it in stand alone mode you need a compatible Kodak camera in the dock. You can then use the screen on the back of the camera to preview your pictures and select them for printing.
One nice feature is the optional battery pack. Charge up a battery, slip the paper tray into its holder and you can head on out you're your Kodak and shoot and print pictures in the field.
In Use
The G600 takes up very little space on your desk. You also get the added bonus that the printer dock will recharge your camera and allow you to transfer pictures from it to your computer.
As an attached printer, the G600 is very easy to use. No mucking about with ICC profiles, paper settings or anything really. Since the printer only takes one type of paper and one type of ribbon you should get the same prints time after time - there's nothing to adjust and nothing to get wrong.
As a standalone printer you get a couple of options such as the chance to remove red eye. But really you just scroll through the pictures and hit print when you see one you like. This can be slightly fiddly since the G600 uses the on camera LCD. I found that the Z710 I tried it with didn't really tilt far enough forwards and I was always peering at it to see the pictures. A separate LCD on a tilt fitting would have been easier but would also have added to the cost.
Print quality
This is a very tough one to call. For lots of pictures the prints looked absolutely great - every bit as good as a mini lab. However, with some very subtle shadowy prints the G600 really struggled. I printed some fireworks shots on it. The fireworks all looked great but the darker areas which had smoke in them were rather murky. It was almost as though the printer added a texture to dark featureless areas and gave them a very subtle banding.
Portraits and general shots all looked fine but once you started looking at the dark areas the flaws were there to see. This clearly isn't a problem putting ink on the paper - real black area were solid black and the G600 gave some really nice black and white portraits. Any area with slight noise in looked a lot worse printed on the G600 than they did on some comparison prints from a mini lab.
For general photography this will produce some very nice 6X4s but if your pictures rely on subtle shadows you may be disappointed.
Dye subs are traditionally susceptible to dust. There's a special flap on the paper tray to keep dust out when you store it. The 5 ptrints I made from the “free” paper in the box all had dust spots on them but I then made several prints over about a week (and left the printer uncovered on my desk) and never saw dust again. My guess is that the first prints cleared out manufacturing residue.
Print longevity
Plenty tough enough. Pictures are completely dry when they come out of the printer (actually they are sealed in) and plunging them immediately into boiling water just makes them curl a bit. Soaking the print in very hot water for 20 mins caused some parts of the surface to become a little rough. The print itself wasn't affected but if you tilted it to the light there was a mottled pattern. At a guess the lamination layer is slightly soluble in very hot water but you're unlikely to try this with your real pictures.
Interestingly if you tear the edge of the picture you can actually peal the print of the paper but really that's pretty pointless...
Prints are very slightly curled as they exit the printer and this is probably due to the clear coat contracting slightly to seal everything in but it's nothing that would worry anyone. Kodak don't quote a specific longevity rating but simply say that they will last “a lifetime” and then go on to say that this is “under typical album display”. My guess is that you can just forget about this - they should last as long as mini lab prints.
Running Costs
You can but 100 sheets and a ribbon to cover them from the Kodak online store for £30. 200 sheets will cost you £40 - that makes 20 - 30 pence per print once you've bought the printer. As long as you buy the bulk pack that's comparable with the Lexmark P350 - see my notes in that review for how that compares to a lab.
What's not to like
It took me 4 hours to install this printer on my Mac. At the time this was hugely annoying but now it's done it's no longer an issue (I'd rather have an install problem than one that affected me every time I used the printer). To save you 4 hours…when you install the G600 is visible in the printer dialogue but no drivers are available. It doesn't matter how often you reinstall EasyShare or download drivers from Kodak they will never show up. Just click “other printers” and eventually you will see a special “Kodak printers” button. Hit that and all will be fine. Obviously that isn't in the manual. Or on the website.
There are a couple of niggles noted earlier in the review. Prints aren't completely flat as they come out, “camera as an LCD” doesn't work as well as a real LCD and you need to watch print quality in shadowy or noisy areas.
Apart from all that the only gripe I had was that the prints don't go edge to edge. Older Kodak printers use tear off strips to get picture all the way to the edge. The G600 does away with that and uses a new ribbon. It prints very very close to the edge but with dark pictures there's a noticeable white edge to all your prints. It's a tiny fraction of a millimetre but it will annoy some users.
