Kodak ESP 5 All-in-One Printer

While this Kodak ESP 5 All-in-One Printer is inexpensive, and despite the decent quality of the prints, it's worth some extra money to get a multifunction printer that works faster and adds a few bells and whistles, such as an automatic document feeder.

I've been waiting a long while to test a Kodak ESP all-in-one printer. With only two inktanks, Kodak promises to keep printing costs low, which may be the highlight of the ESP 5. Two new versions--the ESP 7 and ESP 9--are pricier but offer a lot more value for the money.

That's because the ESP 5, while a decent all-in-one, is not in quite the same league as similar machines from Epson or Canon, and I noticed that the printer is now discounted at Kodak's site. For one thing, it's not very fast; a four-page Excel spreadsheet took over a minute to print, three color graphics pages took 1:32, and a large PDF file took an average of 28 seconds per page.

The printer suffers some of the omissions and weaknesses of low-end all-in-ones. There's no automatic document feeder, and the shared paper input/output tray makes loading paper tricky while at the same time allowing printed pages to sit on top of blank pages. The printer also is fairly noisy, particularly when warming up. And there's no fax, which may offend some all-in-one purists.

On the plus side, print quality is decent for black-and-white and color prints. Viewed at large font sizes it's clear that the printing is not the sharpest ever, but at regular sizes it looks fine and there is no ink bleed into the paper. And the 4x6 photo printed in 46 seconds, which is perfectly reasonable, and gave a print with excellent, sharp colors. I used the included Kodak paper and it was smudge-free right out of the printer.

The Kodak AiO Home Center software that's included with the printer makes scanning simple; the default Save to File is in PDF format, and at 26 seconds for a single color graphic page, it's on par with other printers in this price range.