Kodak ESP 7 Printer Review

Make/Model: Kodak ESP 7

Type: Home/home office, inkjet all-in-one

Web site: www.kodak.co.uk

Typical online price: £135 (£117 ex VAT)

The ESP 7 is the next-to-top Kodak all-in-one and uses the same print engine as all its stable-mates. It lacks the Automatic Document Feeder and fax functions of its big, ESP 9 sibling, but is also £50 cheaper. Finished in gloss and frosted black, it has pleasingly functional lines, with a Kodak-yellow strip along the front and a neat curve to its paper trays.

These trays are the same as on the ESP 9, with a powered, 40-sheet photo tray set in above one for 100 sheets of plain paper. When you choose to print a photo, the photo tray slides into place automatically, so there’s no fiddling.

The machine’s control panel looks a little bare, as there are no fax facilities and hence no number pad for dialling. You do get a 76mm colour LCD display for previewing photos and navigating menus, and there are navigation buttons and others to start and stop copy and scan jobs.

At the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet, but most people will probably go for the WiFi connection, which is easy to set up and gives extra flexibility in siting the machine.

Kodak makes some silly claims for print speeds on the ESP 7: 32ppm for black and 30ppm for colour. Even given that these are for draft mode print, they are very optimistic and under test we saw 5.0ppm for normal black print and 2.0ppm for normal colour. These are reasonable results for this class of inkjet device, though neither is particularly fast.

Print quality is generally very good, with clean black print and reasonable colours. Registration of black text over colour isn’t quite as precise as it could be, but generally for a small or home office, it’ll be adequate.

When it comes to photo prints, the ESP 7 is well up with competitors from Canon, Epson or HP, with good gradated colours and plenty of detail in both well-lit and shadowed areas of images. The transparent overcoat layer applied to all photo prints helps to protect against scratching and ozone damage.

Kodak makes a lot of the low cost of its prints and it certainly comes out as the cheapest way to print inkjet photos. Even when printing correspondence on plain paper, the cost of its two cartridges means it’s one of the cheapest machines to run.

Verdict

Even though Kodak came to the inkjet all-in-one party late, it’s carved itself a respectable niche. The ESP 7 continues the line and is a very sensible and practical multifunction machine for handling photos and general correspondence. The addition of wireless connectivity in a machine at this price is a bonus.

Running Costs: 9/10

Speed: 5.0ppm black, 2.0ppm colour, measured 7/10

Print quality

Text print: 8/10

Text/Graphics: 8/10

Photo 9/10

Features: 9/10

Overall: 8/10

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under Kodak, Printer Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.