Kodak ESP Office 2170 All-in-One Color Printer

Like the higher-priced Kodak ESP Office 6150, the ESP Office 2170--while certainly affordable, at about $149--gives decent printed output but at the cost of a lot of time. Four page PDFs took as much as two minutes from start to finish. Finished products looked good, but not so good as to be an excuse for taking so much time. Like the ESP 6150, you can switch to Draft mode if you're short on time,and if you don't need end results that are excellent. Photos looked very good and were about average speed (1:45 for letter size, about 1:08 for 4x6), with very good-looking end results.

The ESP Office 2170 has wireless networking built in, which I found quick and easy to get set up. Kodak has finally released "Kodak Pic Flic" app that allows smartphone users--including Blackberry users, for a change!--to print directly from a smart phone. There's a 150-page paper tray and a 25-sheet automatic document feeder, which are handy for businesses, since it means adding paper less often. The paper feeds through the back of the printer, not a dedicated tray, so you'll still need to switch if you use different types of paper.

The printer does provide some benefit for office users, such as a scanner, fax, and, copier. Duplexing is manual (it's built in to the 6150), which is too bad but perhaps not a surprise at this price point. The color LCD is 1.5 inches, compared to the 2.4-inch color LCD display on the 6150. The printer's control panel is not cluttered and makes it easy to handle a variety of common tasks.

The 2170 comes with Kodak's high-end scanning software built in (even the 6150 doesn't have that); Kodak Perfect Page helps you scan documents that are in poor condition, such as a page that's been crumpled. The printer also comes with software that allows for printing in 3-D--not the additive manufacturing kind of 3-D, but the kind that works with a pair of funky glasses. That's admittedly a fun option to have, though why it's available on a printer that's aimed at small offices is a bit of a mystery to me.

Still, 3-D printing worked well enough. Simply take a picture, move the camera a few inches to the right, and take another photo. Kodak's software combines the two images into one photo that really does look 3-D when seen through special glasses that probably everyone has by now. I've put a sample image along with the blog post for this software.

Kodak's biggest selling point is its low-price ink replacements--you'll pay about $20 for a high-capacity black inkjet cartridge that can handle about 670 pages, according to the company, and about $34 for a color cartridge that will handle about 550 pages. That's certainly an attractive benefit. Keep in mind that this is a good deal particularly for those who need to print a lot; if you don't, you'll find that you're wasting a fair amount of ink during maintenance cycles, and you may find that you don't get the capacity that you're expecting.