Kodak ESP Office 2170 review

The Kodak ESP Office 2170 is an all-in-one printer designed for use in a home office. As well as letting you print photos and the like, it offers more business-like features, such as an automatic document feeder that allows you to photocopy several pages without having to manually feed each sheet into the scanner. The 2170 is available for around £125.

The 2170 has the usual boxy, angular look of a multi-function printer. Although its matte black, plastic chassis looks rather cheap, we reckon it's likely to stand up well to long-term use. A small stripe of Kodak's corporate yellow on the scanner lid brightens up the device's appearance.

On the front, there's a small, 1.5-inch colour screen. The screen is fine for tasks like setting up the number of photocopies to be made, but it seems very small when you're working with pictures.

Next to the screen there's a pretty busy control panel that has dedicated buttons for copying, scanning, faxing and printing photos. There's also a numerical keypad so you can enter fax numbers. Below this panel, on the left-hand side, there's both a multi-format card reader for printing photos and a USB PictBridge port so you can connect your camera directly to the printer.

On top of the scanner, the 2170 has an automatic document feeder that can accept up to 25 sheets. This allows you to sit a multi-page document in the feeder and have the individual sheets automatically copied or faxed one at a time -- that will prove handy for those who want to use the printer in a home office.

When printing, paper is fed in via a tray on the rear that holds up to 150 sheets. The output is spewed into a telescopic tray at the front.

Setting up the printer is very easy. You can either rely on the on-screen set-up wizard or use the one on the supplied software installation CD. The printer can be connected via USB or Wi-Fi. If you're using Wi-Fi, you don't need to connect the printer to your computer  at all.

The 2170's scanner has an optical resolution of 1,200dpi. It's speedy, and the quality of its scans is impressive. When scanning photos, it does a good job of retaining sharpness on edges and also manages to capture subtle differences in colour hues at the darker end of the spectrum.

The copying speed is fast too, with the 2170 managing to copy our A4 black and white test sheet in just 20 seconds.

This model uses the same print engine as the ESP C310 . It relies on two cartridges -- one for black ink, and one for cyan, magenta and yellow. These slot into a print head that in turn slots into the main printing mechanism housed beneath the scanner.

Kodak ESP 5250 Review | Printers | CNET UK

Kodak's ESP 5250 is a compact all-in-one printer that includes scanning and copying features, as well as integrated Wi-Fi. Kodak also claims that it's one of the cheapest inkjet printers around in terms of running costs. You can pick it up for about £70.

The 5250's body is made entirely from plastic, with a slightly textured, dotted pattern used on the lid, and glossy highlighting on the front and top control panel. There's also a flash of yellow -- Kodak's corporate colour -- used on the edge of the scanner lid.

The right-hand side of the top of the printer is home to a flip-up, 2.4-inch colour screen along with the various buttons to help you navigate through the easy-to-use menus. The printer's card reader supports SD and Memory Stick media, but it doesn't have a PictBridge-compatible USB port for directly attaching a camera -- something found on some other models in the Kodak range.

The 5250 can be connected to your computer either via Wi-Fi or a standard USB lead. The Wi-Fi connection is very easy to set up.

Unlike the Kodak ESP C310 and ESP Office 2170 , the 5250 uses Kodak's 10-series cartridges. There are two distinct cartridges: one black one and one that contains five ink colours. These slot into a print head that then slots into the main mechanism under the scanner.

Kodak's printers may cost slightly more than rival machines, but their running costs are lower, thanks to their cheaper ink cartridges. This model is no exception, as a black and white A4 sheet costs around 2.25p to print, while a colour sheet works out at around 3.79p. That's very cheap for an inkjet printer.

When it comes to the actual printing process, paper is fed into the 5250 upside down via a paper tray at the front that can hold up to 100 sheets. Rather inelegantly, printed material comes back out at the front and is plonked on top of the unprinted sheets. This type of configuration may be common on budget models, but it's still a very clumsy approach and you often have to reseat the unprinted paper to stop it from interfering with new sheets that are being spewed out.

Print speeds are also quite slow. The printer took 2 minutes and 4 seconds to print our ten-page black and white text document, which isn't bad, but it was very slow to finish our ten-page colour business presentation, taking 4 minutes and 15 seconds.

The 5250 didn't do much better in our colour graphics test, as printing ten copies of our test sheet took 3 minutes and 18 seconds. Photo printing proved much more speedy, though. The 5250 pumped out a 6- by 4-inch print in just 43 seconds.

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