Kodak’s main weapon in this new war is cheaper ink. Traditionally, H-P and other makers have sold the printers for relatively little, then made most or all of their money on the ink cartridges.

So, Kodak decided to reverse that business model. Its three new printers start at $149.99, not sub-$100 bargain prices. But its black ink cartridges cost just $9.99, and the color ones — which combine five color inks — just $14.99. And these are standard-capacity cartridges, not small or starter versions. Comparable H-P cartridges vary in price, but can easily cost double that, or more.

Kodak hopes consumers will be willing to spend more upfront for the printer to save later on the ink.

In a counter-move, H-P announced Tuesday that it will also be introducing new lower-price cartridges. But these new low-end cartridges will work only on future printers (and a few very recent models). And they will hold less ink than today’s standard. Plus, they will still cost more than Kodak’s cartridges: $14.99 for black and $17.99 for the combined color versions. H-P will also start selling larger-capacity “value” cartridges for the new printers that will cost about twice as much as the low-end ink, but print up to triple the number of pages.

How good are Kodak’s new printers? After all, cheaper ink isn’t really a bargain if the printer is lousy. To find out, I’ve been testing Kodak’s midrange model, the EasyShare 5300, which costs $199.99. It’s an “all-in-one” machine that combines a printer with a flatbed copier and scanner.

I compared this new Kodak with a roughly comparable all-in-one H-P model, the Photosmart C6180. This particular H-P model costs $100 more than the Kodak, because it includes some additional features. But H-P says that this printer has the same printing, scanning and copying quality and speeds, in the typical scenarios I tested, as H-P’s C5180, the direct competitor of the Kodak 5300, which costs the same.

My conclusion was that the Kodak EasyShare 5300 is a pretty good printer, with a good enough combination of quality, speed and functionality to satisfy people attracted by the lower ink costs. In my tests, it was better than the H-P at some things and worse at others.

One caveat: I didn’t try to verify Kodak’s claim that, overall, its printouts cost a lot less than H-P’s. Such claims depend on very specific sorts of test files produced and tested in labs. H-P disputes Kodak’s testing methodology and claims that Kodak’s printout costs are “about the same or only slightly lower than H-P’s.”

Also, the particular H-P models with which the Kodak printers most closely compare use a different ink system than most other H-P home inkjet printers. Instead of using one combined color cartridge that can cost over $30, they use five smaller separate ones that cost $9.99 each.

I decided to avoid settling this technical dispute and to just judge the printers using home photos and text pages from Microsoft Office that I considered typical. I used both printers at normal quality levels and didn’t enable any special quality or speed settings. I tested them with a Windows XP computer, though both printers also work with Macs and with the new Windows Vista.

In general, the H-P was a little faster, but not dramatically so. And the H-P has built-in networking, while the Kodak doesn’t. The H-P also has a better user interface, in my opinion. Kodak’s can be clumsy.

But the Kodak has a cool scanning feature the H-P lacks. You can place three or four photos on its glass plate at once and the printer will separate them automatically into individual images and scan them as separate files — as long as they aren’t aligned too crookedly. To do this on the H-P, you must manually draw lines around each photo with the H-P software.

When I compared plain-paper printouts, in black and white, and color, the printers were about equal in quality. The H-P was a tad faster, but the Kodak was plenty quick.

On photos, I had a mixed result. The 4×6 snapshots of family scenes came out better, to my eye, on the Kodak. They seemed sharper and brighter than the same files printed on the H-P. But I had just the opposite result when scanning several 20-year-old photos into the two machines. The resulting files produced by the H-P seemed sharper and brighter. The Kodak scans, while warmer, seemed fuzzier.

The worst feature of the Kodak is the way it switches between its plain-paper feed tray and its special separate tray for 4×6 snapshot-size photo paper. On the Kodak, you must manually push in and pull out the photo tray to switch between types of paper. The H-P handles this switch without any pushing or pulling.

Overall, however, the Kodak is a good enough first effort to get the company into the game.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

You could use the software that came with the camera for some of this, but, in general, software created by hardware companies isn’t very good. Since most people use Windows computers, they will likely just dump the pictures into the My Pictures folder that Windows provides. But this folder was never meant for true photo organizing.

If you use an Apple Macintosh, you’re in much better shape, because Apple provides a very good built-in photo-organizing program called iPhoto. But iPhoto isn’t integrated with any of the popular online photo sites that let you store and share pictures. And, of course, it’s unavailable to the vast majority of people, who use Windows.

However, there’s a very nice photo-organizing program out there that’s free, works on both Windows and Mac and is closely integrated with one of the best online photo sites. It brings most of the best features of iPhoto to Windows users, and for Mac users, it offers tight integration with a Web-based photo site.

This free software is called EasyShare, and it comes from Eastman Kodak, though you don’t have to own a Kodak camera or printer to use it. It works with any brand of camera and printer to easily organize, email, print and touch up your pictures. And it’s closely linked to Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery online photo site, formerly called Ofoto, which is one of the best Web photo services and is free to use.

I’ve been testing EasyShare, on both a Windows and a Macintosh computer, and I like it. It’s the exception to the rule that hardware companies can’t create good software. EasyShare comes with all Kodak cameras and printers. Owners of other brands can download it by going to kodak.com and clicking on “Downloads & Drivers.”

Photo-organizing programs are different from traditional photo-editing software like Adobe’s Photoshop. Where traditional photo software is mainly about tweaking and perfecting your pictures, organizing programs are mainly about finding, arranging and sharing pictures, with a little light editing thrown in.

There are other popular Windows programs that aim to help you organize your pictures. Among the best known are Picasa, ACDSee and Corel Photo Album. Adobe had a good organizer called Photoshop Album, but it has since folded it into its editing-centric Photoshop Elements.

But most of these programs fall short of the combination of simplicity and power that Apple’s iPhoto pioneered. They often require users to know too much about the Windows folder and file system. By contrast, EasyShare, like iPhoto, frees you from the file system, relying instead on its own system for organizing your pictures.

As in iPhoto, a key feature of EasyShare is the virtual album, which doesn’t correspond to any folder on the hard disk. Any picture can appear in an infinite number of virtual albums without having to be copied or taking up extra harddisk space. For instance, a picture of Sally opening a Christmas gift in Providence, R.I., in 2005, could appear in albums called “Christmas,” “Sally,” “Providence trip,” “2005″ and so on.

EasyShare lets you burn CDs of your photos, easily email them to friends and print them in creative ways. It also has some very nice touch-up features, including a one-click fix function that previews changes by splitting the picture temporarily into “before” and “after” halves.

Kodak’s EasyShare on Windows

The Windows and Mac versions of EasyShare look very different, but they share the same basic commands and about 95% of the features. The Windows version has a few editing features the Mac version lacks, including editing of uncompressed RAW photo files. The Mac version also has some things the Windows version lacks, such as automated backups and the ability to create “smart albums,” which automatically gather up photos based on criteria you set in advance.

Once your photos are in virtual albums inside EasyShare, these albums can be uploaded to the online EasyShare Gallery. You can also designate pictures in any album as “favorites,” and they can be automatically synchronized with a favorites collection online.

Obviously, this integration with the online site is a business strategy for Kodak: Once your pictures are stored on its online site, Kodak hopes you’ll order prints and gifts made from them. But you don’t have to join the site to use EasyShare, even though the program will nag you to do so. And if you do join, the Gallery is free and very useful. It provides a safe backup for your photos and a way to share them without emailing copies all around. Instead, you send emails from the software that offer links to the photos on the Gallery.

If you’re getting a new digital camera or are just buried in pictures from an old one, Kodak EasyShare software is worth a try.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

That’s the question Kodak seeks to answer this week as it ships an unusual digital camera that’s able to wirelessly email the photos it takes, and upload them to a Web site, all by itself — without the need for a computer or a cellphone.

The $599 Kodak EasyShare-one camera comes with a Wi-Fi wireless networking card that pops up from a slot on the top of the camera to connect with any Wi-Fi network in range. Once connected, the camera can email pictures to friends and family and upload them to Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery photo Web site.

I’ve been testing the EasyShare-one for several days, and I like a lot of things about it. The pictures are very good, the user interface is one of the best I’ve seen on any digital camera, and the three-inch color screen is the largest on any digital camera I’ve tested. When the wireless capability works, it works well. I was able to email pictures, and upload them to the Kodak Web site, directly from the camera.

But the wireless features didn’t always function properly in my tests and in some cases required complicated technical work-arounds. Also, the camera has a few other downsides, including lousy battery life, especially when using the wireless features.

The EasyShare-one isn’t the only camera with Wi-Fi capability. Nikon is shipping a Wi-Fi camera as well, but, amazingly, it can’t connect to the Internet. Some other digital cameras have built-in wireless capabilities via Bluetooth. But Bluetooth is a short-range technology that doesn’t connect directly to the Internet, and so it’s mainly useful for beaming pictures to a PC or printer — something the new Kodak can also do.

This new wireless Kodak model is part of an integrated strategy the company is pursuing to tie together its cameras and printers and the EasyShare Gallery Web site, formerly known as Ofoto. Once uploaded, the pictures can be stored and shared with others. You can also order prints of them or gift items emblazoned with them.

Not only can you upload pictures from the EasyShare-one to the online gallery site, but you can wirelessly download small-sized copies of photos already stored on the site into the camera — so you can review them or show them to others right on the camera’s beautiful screen. Up to 1,500 of these downloaded pictures can fit in the camera’s internal memory if nothing else is stored there.

The EasyShare-one is a handsome, brushed-metal camera whose screen swings out from the body and swivels, much like the screens on camcorders. It has a maximum resolution of four megapixels, which is plenty for consumer photos. The lens features a 3X optical zoom. There’s no optical viewfinder, which is too bad.

This camera can accept a memory card but doesn’t include one. It does come with a relatively generous 256 megabytes of internal memory. Its startup and shooting speeds are relatively slow but acceptable for all but the fastest action shots.

A camera with Wi-Fi isn’t as convenient for emailing or uploading photos as a camera phone. That’s because you have to be near a Wi-Fi network or public “hot spot” for Wi-Fi to work. By contrast, the cellphone networks used by camera phones are much more widespread. On the other hand, no camera phone has the capabilities or picture quality of a real digital camera like the EasyShare-one.

When you pop up the Wi-Fi card on the Kodak camera, it seeks and connects to any Wi-Fi network in range. Then, it downloads the Web address for the Kodak Web site. After that, you can use the screen and stylus to select pictures you’ve taken and email them or upload them to the site. Emails don’t actually contain the pictures. They provide links to view the pictures on the Kodak site.

This worked very smoothly in most cases. But at my home, the process failed two out of three times, even though the EasyShare-one connected smoothly to my very fast home Wi-Fi network. The reason was that the camera was often unable to download the Web address for the Kodak site. At first, the company said it was because of problems on its servers. But the problem repeated itself.

The camera can also wirelessly transfer and synchronize photos with a Windows or Mac computer if you have installed Kodak software. But in my tests it had trouble getting through my firewall, and Kodak advised me to make a bunch of techie tweaks to the computer. Not only are these tweaks beyond what most users could do, or should have to do, but they didn’t work. Luckily, the camera can also connect to a PC via a cable.

Another big problem was battery life. It’s only good enough for a measly hour when you’re using the Wi-Fi card, four hours while browsing photos, and 200 shots while taking photos. Kodak does supply an extra battery with the camera, but it makes you spend $30 more for an electrical adapter, which would be handy.

Overall, the EasyShare-one is a good first step toward merging the wireless convenience of a camera phone with the quality and features of a real digital camera. But it needs work.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com