Kodak ESP 9250 All-in-One Printer

At the high end of the ESP line is the Kodak ESP 9250, an all-in-one that offers a fax, scanner, copier, and easily configured wireless. Like other ESP printers, it's not very fast, with first pages taking almost 30 seconds to print. Photos look great but text printing is not all that dazzling, nor is the clumsy analog control panel--especially after other printer companies are doing such a great job with touchscreen panels. Finally, this is an expensive printer: It retails on Kodak's site for almost $250, where there's a lot of strong competition. I don't think there's enough here to justify that price.

The Kodak ESP 9250 doesn't come cheap--at nearly $250, it's at the high end of almost all the printers I test. And while it offers some handy features such as a fax and scanner and a dedicated tray for photo paper, I don't think it outpunches its competitors.

Like other ESP printers, the ESP 9250 has a tiny, 2.4-inch color LCD screen on a tilting control panel. Since there's a fax machine built in, the panel has a number pad in addition to a copy, fax, and scan button, several Start buttons, and so on. This somewhat clunky, analog control panel 9and its old-fashioned push button main control) is quickly disappearing--look at the Lexmark S605 or the Epson Artisan 810 (which is substantially cheaper than the ESP 9250)for some recent, and excellent, examples of the next generation of touchscreens. The ESP 9250 offers a fax machine, a dedicated photo tray that makes printing photos a bit easier, an automatic document feeder, and an automatic duplexer that are certainly handy items. I found the lower paper tray tricky to use for more than 30-40 pieces of paper at one time.

Most print speeds were disappointing. First pages typically took about 30 seconds to come out (a bit slower than the cheaper ESP 7250), and jobs averaged about 16 seconds per page (normal printing) afterwards. The final prints looked decent but again, not great; with a little magnification you can see the ink bleeding into the paper. I noticed that cheap copy paper was saturated easily by the ink, leaving color duplex jobs pretty limp.

Kodak printers typically shine when it comes to photo printing, and the 9250 did not disappoint. A 4x6 photo took about 47 seconds to print, and the results looked very good, with true colors and sharp details.

Wireless was very easy to configure with the ESP 9250, which is a helpful feature. An optional feature allows for Bluetooth printing.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.