Ink's the key to Kodak 5300 vs HP C5180 all-in-one printer battle

Magnus Felke is on a crusade. Consumers, he says, are being "ripped off" by ink jet printer vendors, who sell printers at low margins so they can rake in the dough once consumers are locked into using their ink cartridges. On this point I happen to agree. But there's a method to Felke's righteous anger. The director of product marketing at Kodak has been is stoking the populist agenda as the vendor markets a competing line of ink jet printers, which it says use lower cost ink.

Kodak's model 5300 All-in-One printer takes dead aim at HP's Photosmart C5180 printer. After a week of testing both models my office is awash in paper, but I'm finally wrapping things up. One thing is clear: ink costs are a big deal when it comes to photos because it's the ink and printer combination that produce the results. The technology is in the ink as much as the printer, which is simply a mechanism to deliver the ink properly.

It comes as no surprise, then, that while Kodak promises lower cost ink than HP, its inks are just as proprietary. As with HP, Kodak would prefer that you bought all of your consumables from them, rather than from second sources. And since its new 5000 series all-in-one printers are new, you'll have a hard time finding remanufactured cartridges for it - even for black, which is not used in photos and arguably should be purchased from the lowest cost source. I'm finishing up the comparative review now.

So who won? You'll find out when Computerworld publishes the results next week.