I had no intention of buying a 2003, 5MP digital bridge camera, nor did I have any particular need for one but when you just happen to spot an auction ending for a bunch of camera gear and the price is still 99p with zero bids… It’s almost criminal not to bid, isn’t it?
This is how I ended up with a very well looked after, boxed, Kodak DX7590 complete with memory card and Australian charger. Inside the box were all sorts of bits and pieces including various dock adapters, original manuals and software, some photo paper and the original receipt for an odd business in Melbourne. From reading the leaflets, it quickly became clear that the whole point in these cameras was the heavy integration with the “Easy Share” photo printing system that enables quick and easy photo prints at home.
I’ve written before about the lack of physical prints and still believe that we’re missing out not having our photos in physical form. I’ve tried thermal printers like the Canon Zoe Mini and Kodak Printomatic and they leave a lot to be desired in print quality and resolution, fun though they are. I’ve also tried Instax and would rather cheese grate my own fingers off than use the God awful Instax Mini range ever again. The idea of owning a mini printing dock that could print “lab quality” prints quickly became quite attractive.
I bet they’re expensive though, right? Apparently not. It appears that Kodak sold quite a lot of these Easy Share printers and you can buy them complete for about £20. I was more than happy to pay this for a printer when I spotted an auction for, you guessed it, a boxed printer, with new print refill and paper for… 99p. It couldn’t happen again, could it?
Yep. £1.98 in total and I had myself a camera, printer and enough paper to last a lifetime. Bargain of the century, right? I guess we should find out.
In this post:
The 99p haul…
As a seller, especially of a product that is in decent condition, it must be fairly disappointing when your item sells for 99p. No one wants this. You start the auction low to attract interest but you don’t expect it to sell for next to nothing. When you take auction fees, postage and effort into account you’re almost certainly making a net loss. I’m not surprised when sellers don’t bother to send items out, or send them in a plastic water bottle wrapped in an entire roll of parcel tape…
It was a genuine and pleasant surprise when both items, from different sellers turned up in perfect condition. I left them warm and glowing feedback but it feels rather hollow when actually I should’ve sent them a few quid for even bothering to honour the auctions in the first place.
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I now have so much paper. The seller of the DX7590 must’ve also owned an EasyShare printer because they included several unopened packs of paper and the printer dock adapter. The printer too came with piles of unopened paper and a nearly finished printer refill.
As an aside, the printer uses a process called dye sublimation to make the prints. Dye sublimation makes a really robust, high quality print that should last a long time and resist fading. This works by printing the photo in layers of yellow, red and blue with a final clear top coat to protect the print. During this process the photo is imprinted as a positive on the various layers of thin plastic film that make up the printing cartridge. This raises an interesting security / privacy concern.
The seller of my printer left their almost finished cartridge inside but it’s almost impossible to tell how used up that cartridge is. The printer does notify you when it thinks the roll is empty, but it can be easily fooled by other things like a misfeed. When I tested it, the printer complained the cartridge was used up already, so I took it out and wound it on to the next frame, popped it back in and it continued to work. When it did finally run out again, I thought I’d pop it open to see whether it was truly finished or had just jammed for some reason. This is when I discovered that when you open the cartridge and hold it up to the light you can see every single print they ever made. With a scanner, you could very easily reproduce these pictures. Fortunately, this roll didn’t contain any images that would require therapy after viewing but is a clear warning that you should dispose of your digital equipment carefully, you never know what personal information people can recover even if you think its been deleted.
If you’re wondering, the previous owners of this printer had been to the Olympics in 2012 and had a very good time by the look of it.
EasyShare printing
There are two main methods of using the Easy Share printer, the simplest of which is just to drop the camera on top, select the image you want and press print. This is a really easy (no pun intended), convenient method of making prints. When something works as well as this, it encourages you to use it more and that’s the whole point – digital photography caused a massive shift away from physical prints because you no longer needed to visit a lab and negatives necessitated prints, you had to have them, but with a digital camera you can just look at images on screen. Whilst that’s nice, it’s not as nice as having proper prints, there is still something very special about holding a photograph you have made in your hand, being able to frame it up and put it on the wall or showing it to others. We need to print more!
However, there is a glaring downside to this process and that is the total lack of editing or post processing control. The DX7590 does not allow you to shoot RAW and so you have very limited options when it comes to editing your images. JPG edits when this camera was released were usually destructive and every time you save the image you bake in more and more compression artefacts. In other words, you either get it right in camera or you don’t print your image.

The second method is to connect the printer to your computer and send prints in the same way you’d use any printer. There are two hurdles here. This printer is from the early 2000’s and as we so painfully recalled last time I took some early 2000’s tech for a ride, manufacturers didn’t believe in following standards. USB? Yes, we’ve heard of USB, let’s take it, make the socket a different shape and make it completely non-standard just for fun! You don’t need to be a genius to guess that the Kodak printer used a really absurd, niche, non standard connection.
Do you know what’s more absurd? They added a normal USB-A connection for you to connect a memory stick or camera from a different brand, but this port won’t work if you plug it in to a PC! No, if you want to plug into a PC you need the proprietary cable which didn’t come with my printer, but in a total stroke of good fortune, the seller of the camera just happened to have left theirs in the box. Result.
There are some other issues these days. Built in obsolescence means that you can’t get drivers for anything later than Windows 2000/XP. There are ways around this – you can install Linux and it works with that but you don’t get the software that came with the printer (not exactly essential) or you can do what I did and drag out your dedicated Windows 2000 machine that you keep in a cupboard for just these kinds of occasions. I mean, who doesn’t do that?
When you overcome this issue you then fall down on one final hardware limitation. This printer doesn’t have a great deal of memory which caused some initial confusion when I tried some test prints and the printer just sat there doing nothing for ages. You don’t get an error message, there’s no indication that anything is wrong. Windows shrugs its shoulders and sits the image in the print queue waiting for the printer to do something, but because the printer has to contain the entire image before it can begin, this never happens – you cannot stream data to the printer, it has to be all in one.
What’s the limit of the Easy Share printer? 3mb. Three.
That’s smaller than any picture you take on your phone and smaller than nearly any picture you take on any remotely modern device. You can print images from a computer and it works perfectly, but you’ll need to do some fairly dramatic resizing beforehand. This is a shame because the printer is so compact and the images look fantastic when they come out that it really wouldn’t look out of place on a desk connected to a modern computer. I’d absolutely use this as my regular photo printer if I could use it without these limitations. That’s a shame.
The joy of print

The DX7590 takes five megapixel images which are plenty big and detailed enough for the 6×4 inch prints the EasyShare makes. It gives you a full range of shooting modes including manual and you can also select from ISO 50 to 400. However, I wouldn’t recommend using ISO 400 in anything but an emergency situation because the noise is awful. Even for the time it was released, the level of noise is verging on totally unacceptable.
The lens is a 10x optical zoom which gives you a huge range, but don’t get too excited because there’s zero image stabilisers meaning you need either excellent light or a tripod at the long end of the zoom. With its limited ISO range of only up to 400, you can’t just whack the ISO right up to compensate for camera shake. This is a shame, because there are lots of situations where it’d be nice to take shots at the long end, hand held where there are no practical places to lean the camera for some extra stability.
On the whole, the camera falls firmly into the “it’s ok” category and contains all the things you’d expect from a design so old. The controls are fine once you learn them, but cumbersome in terms of trying to click wheels that want to rotate. The joystick is a bonus on the back and I liked the EVF, it’s reasonable enough and certainly better than the last camera I bought for a pound which also had an EVF, the Fuji Finepix S3500. With better high ISO performance, the inclusion of ISO 800 or image stabilisation, it would still make an excellent little camera. As it stands, it’s definitely a camera you’d only use for the simplistic compatibility with the printer dock.

However, the combination of camera and printer is a total winner. I think the print quality is absolutely superb. For a 5mp camera and a 20 year old printer that cost a quid you cannot complain. These prints are easily the same quality as those you get from the kiosks you find in supermarkets and other places where you can print your own photos from a phone or memory card. The printer doesn’t do so well with black and white images, introducing some almost pink/purple colouring where there should be none, but. for colour prints? Yep, I’ll take these all day long.
But wait… There’s one more thing.
Many years ago, cameras used to come with “PictBridge” functionality. You plug your camera into a compatible printer via USB and then you can make prints directly without a computer. Considering the printer couldn’t handle larger prints from a PC, I didn’t hold out much chance of it being able to print images from an SLR, but thought I’d give it a go anyway with my £5 Canon 40D.
The 40D takes 10MP images and JPG images straight out of the camera are between 3-5mb in size. I whipped it out of the cupboard, took a test shot and hooked it up to the printer using the appropriate cable. Of course, at this point the rubber covers on the 40D snapped in half because they become extremely brittle over time. The camera detected the printer and offered a number of options including some basic post processing that could be applied in camera before printing. I’ve never used this feature on any camera before and it’s really quite good for quick prints.

I changed none of the options and went for a straight print, direct from the camera without any editing, sharpening or so forth. The picture was taken using a 50mm F1.8 STM lens at F1.8, ISO 800. The result is… remarkable.

It’s amazing. I can’t get over it. Hooking the printer up to a better camera really shows what its capable of. More than that, however, is the fact it worked in the first place. The printer did sit there for around a minute or so thinking about it at first and I did think it was just going to give up, but between the printer and the camera, somewhere along the line they decided to play nicely and produce a print. The combination of better camera and much better lens produces a print that’s just incredible.
This opens up a whole new use case for this printer. Whilst using it with a computer is a painful experience and the Kodak DX7590 isn’t a great camera these days, the fact you can plug it in to a reasonably decent DSLR and produce some quick prints makes it really quite useful again.
Conclusions and learning

Let’s get straight to the point. You can definitely buy an old digital camera for 99p or next to nothing without a great deal of difficulty. This isn’t so remarkable these days where technology has moved so fast and created such vast obsolescence. There will be thousands of houses all around the world with cameras like this just sat in drawers gathering dust. Phone cameras have seen off 90% of the digital compact and even bridge/super zoom market due to their sheer convenience.
Is there any point buying a cheap digital camera like this? No. Not really. If you own a phone made in the last five years then you’re carrying round a camera of equal or higher quality already, coupled with the ability to wirelessly transmit, share and print your pictures. You really would gain nothing.
The Kodak DX7590 is certainly capable of taking some nice pictures, but the zoom lens is wasted without being stabilised and the maximum ISO of 400 is too limiting. When it comes to digital photography, there are so many top quality cameras out there for next to nothing it just isn’t logical to go out and deliberately buy one that would limit or annoy you in some way.

The printer, however, is another story entirely. Although it was designed to interface perfectly with a Kodak digital camera, that doesn’t mean it has to be used this way. The compact footprint means you can leave it out on a desk ready to use without it being intrusive and the paper and ink refills are still comparatively cheap. For £14 ish you can pick up a 40 print pack which works out at 35p per print. This is a decent deal for the convenience of being able to make your own prints at home on a machine that is still capable of printing really very pleasing photographs on decent paper that will last you a while.
There are some obvious reasons they’re going for 99p. Later printers offer the convenience of wireless printing which would definitely be a nice to have and, of course, compatibility with more modern computers. Furthermore, you’re likely to find that later printers will have far more memory in them which would enable even higher quality prints whilst eliminating the long pause before the machine springs in to life.
Are these printers truly obsolete these days? Well, no, not really. If you’ve any cameras with direct print functionality you can still use them to get direct prints. Of course, you lose the ability to manipulate your prints before hand, but that was never the real purpose of this printer. Kodak designed the EasyShare system to enable photographers to quickly, cheaply and conveniently print snapshots to frame or share with their friends. In that sense, it still does this perfectly well. Whilst there are refills and paper available, why wouldn’t you pick one up for next to nothing to get a few prints from your old cameras? They’re a total bargain.
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