Reliability Test: Three months with Kodak's ESP-7 All-in-One Printer
- TAGS:all-in-one, inkjet, Kodak, MFP, multifunction printer, printer, printer ink
- IT TOPICS:Hardware
Should Kodak's ESP-7 All-in-One be on your holiday shopping list? If you print a lot of photos and need a multipurpose printing and scanning unit, it may be worth considering. But there are some tradeoffs to weigh.
The big plus: Lower printing costs
The ESP-7, which sells for about $125 includes a scanner/photocopier and ink jet printer with separate full sheet and snapshot paper trays. Like Kodak's other printers in the ESP line, the ESP-7 offers users color ink at substantially less than competing models. In my test of a predecessor to the ESP 7, color ink costs came in at one third the cost of a competing HP printer. I didn't run the full suite of tests again on the ESP-7, but it uses the same cartridges and print head technology.
I've had an ESP-7 in my office for some extended testing. For three months I've been running the ESP-7 as my primary office printer. During that time I've run hundreds of pages of text, graphics and photos through it, and consumed a half dozen or so ink cartridges. I have experienced no reliability problems. On the other hand, some aspects of its performance were disappointing.
What's to like
My first impressions of the ESP-7 still hold. Here's what's cool: The unit doesn't have separate color ink tanks like HP's models do, but ink costs per page are still much cheaper than other models. You'll save money if you do a lot of color printing (if you do mostly monochrome you're better off with a laser printer, which can be had for less than the cost of an all-in-one printer and costs far less per page to run). Setup is easy, and an auto-sensing paper tray estimates remaining paper and tells you whether there's enough to complete your next print job. The paper-saving duplex printing function is wonderful.The ESP-7 works on a wired or wireless Ethernet network.
The downside
Not so cool: The ESP-7 is relatively expensive compared to some competitors, it's a bit noisy, when your ink runs out you can't use any functions of the multifunction device - including the scanner - and print speeds are significantly slower than for some competing models out there. Personally I didn't find the noise level too disturbing as long as I'm not on the phone (the unit sits right next to me on my desk), but there's a lot of clunking and shifting that goes on as the paper handling mechanism feeds the paper into position. That fact, I suspect, has led some users to voice concerns in various forums that the unit is less than solidly built. Overall, however, I didn't experience any problems with fit, finish or function.
Wireless printing? Nice idea but...
The Kodak unit supports printing over a home wireless network. It may work for you, but I had trouble getting it to connect reliably. I'm not sure I can blame Kodak entirely for that. As with everything Wi-Fi, it seems, getting wireless connectivity to work was messy. I had my share of weird connectivity problems that weren't easy to track down or fix, and my wireless printing was slow and trouble prone. After fiddling endlessly with settings on several different laptops, wireless routers and the ESP-7, I finally ran out of patience. It was easier to just plug the damned thing into the computer and be done with it.
Print quality:Â The good and the not so good
My testing of the ESP-7 for print quality was a mixed bag. Photo image quality you'll get from the ESP-7 certainly isn't on par with what you'd get from the Kodak kiosk in your local Wal-Mart - but that's not what you should expect from a $200 home printer. When put up against a competitive HP all-in-one ink jet printer, photo print colors were less vibrant (but if the Kodak photos appeared faded, the HP unit produced oversaturated colors). For every day photo printing I found image quality to be good but not outstanding. Using a higher grade of photo paper did help with some prints. See the link above to see a few image comparisons.
When printing text documents, the black text had a slightly brownish hue and it wasn't nearly as dark and crisp as what my LaserJet 1018 delivers. It was, however, perfectly readable.
But printing of graphics images was more problematic. Using the plain old 20 lb copy paper I usually throw into my laser printer resulted in noticeably washed out colors and some banding in areas of solid color. Solid color fills tended to saturate regular copy paper, resulting in severe curling in one case.
As a test I printed this ESG Lab Audit Summary Report. A solid blue vertical stripe along the left side of the opening page showed some banding (horizontal striping consisting of lighter and darker areas down the page) and the ink saturated the page so badly that that edge of the paper curled upward by almost 90 degrees. Colors also appeared dull, or washed out, when compared to what was displayed on screen. Switching to 24 lb ink jet-grade paper mitigated the curling problem somewhat, although it still curled noticeably and the banding persisted. That paper, at $6 for 500 sheets, is nearly double the cost of what I'd normally use in my laser printer.
Just for fun I inserted a sheet of Kodak's premium grade photo paper, Kodak Ultra, to see what would happen. The result: much improved color and sharpness. The cost per page was way too high for everyday printing, of course. If you're going to use the ESP-7 to print graphics, ink jet paper is the minimum grade you should use.
The buzz on reliability
Many users have posted comments to my earlier Kodak ESP blogs posts complaining about reliability issues with the ESP series. Many of the complaints had to do with failed print heads, which is one reason why I brought in the ESP-7 for some extended testing.
To date I have had no problems whatsoever with reliability.
What to make of the negative buzz online? To some extent one must take comments online with a grain of salt. People who post tend to be those who have have something to complain about, while satisfied customers tend to remain silent. Indeed, many comments about competing printers online are also negative.
But customer satisfaction with the ESP-7 appears to be comparatively poorer overall than with competing projects. At Amazon.com, for example, user ratings of the ESP-7 are disproportionately negative (49 of 92 rankings giving it Amazon's lowest score as of this date), while the competing Epson Artisan 810 user reviews and user ratings of the HP Photosmart C4680 are disporportionately positive. Similar results show up in some other e-commerce sites. Again, the grain of salt: The numbers of users who post ratings and comments in such forums is very small when compared to the total number of printers sold. You also never know whether someone - such as a rogue employee at a competitor - is deliberately gaming the reviews by posting lots of negative reports under different names that can't be authenticated. Most user reviews online function as a pool of anonymously submitted and unsubstantiated claims. In whom do you trust?
For its part, Kodak flatly denies that there are any current problems with the defective print heads on the ESP line, although a comment Kodak's Cheryl Pohman, director of worldwide marketing for ink jets, made to me last August, seemed to at least acknowledge there might have been some in the past. "Whenever you launch into a new category and you have a new product you might see some issues. We believe that all of those problems are behind us now," she said. That may be true, but user satisfaction ratings have yet to catch up. Reports of print head issues and other problems have continued to accumulate in online forums since that our conversation took place.
Bottom line? If you print a lot of photos, need a multifunction printer and want lower operating costs, the ESP-7 is worth considering. Is there a reliability risk? I didn't experience any problems in three months of use and wouldn't hesitate to buy one, but there are enough complaints of a similar nature online to warrant some caution.
That said, if you're interested in spending less on ink supplies, the Kodak EasyShare Printer line is still the only game in town.
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