Product Reviews

When Kodak entered the inkjet all-in-one market a couple of years ago, many people wondered if it wasn't too late, given the maturity of the marketplace. In fact, the company's all-in-ones have sold well enough for it to introduce four new machines. The ESP 7 is near the top of the ESP range, and sells itself on its low running costs and a good feature set.

All four new all-in-ones use the same print engine as that found in the company's original two all-in-ones. This accounts for some good economies of scale in the two ink cartridges: one black and the other fourcolour, with a transparent overlay.

This machine is decked out in black with a thin Kodak-orange stripe along the front edge of the scanner lid. It's a singlesheet, A4 flatbed scanner, with no automatic document feeder.

The simple control panel, which can be flipped up from the machine's front, looks a little empty because it also lacks the fax facilities of its more expensive sibling, the ESP 9. It has a large, bright 76mm colour LCD display, which it uses for menu navigation and photo print preview, although the design of the display font could have better stroke width and spacing.

Push-button controls are located on either side of the screen, with menu and zoom on one side and a navigation diamond on the other, together with Start and Cancel buttons for copy jobs.

The ESP 7 has two paper trays: a 100-sheet A4 main tray; and a supplementary, 40-sheet, 15 x 10cm photo tray, above. The photo tray is powered and is automatically drawn in when you select to print photos. Paper feeds out to a telescopic support at the front of the machine, which increases its footprint quite substantially.

To the right of the paper trays are twin memory card slots, with a PictBridge socket beneath for digital cameras.

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At the back are sockets for USB 2 and Ethernet networking, but the majority of customers will probably use the machine's wireless network support.

Once we'd used the ESP 7's wireless wizard to recognise our lab network and installed the printer drivers from the supplied CD, getting our test Mac to spot the device and make a wifi connection was easy. Once set up, you can position it wherever you want.

This machine makes a cacophony of different feeding, pumping and manoeuvring noises. When you switch it on after a few days of inactivity, this preparation can take over a minute - and it's not exactly a quiet machine at the best of times

It's not a particularly quick all-in-one, either, with a simple, 10-page text print taking three minutes 32 seconds in our tests, which is equivalent to 2.8ppm (pages per minute). Introducing colour or switching to duplex print - the ESP 7 supports duplex print as standard - reduced the speed to 2.4ppm. A single-page copy took just over 40 seconds, while printing a 15 x 10cm photo took 55 seconds. This was slightly slower than when we printed from an SD card, which completed in 48 seconds.

Print quality was generally well above average, with text on plain paper coming through largely clear and precise. Colour graphics were a little mottled, which implies not quite enough ink on the paper fibres. However, photo prints were very good, with plenty of shadow detail, as well as smooth colour transitions and natural colouring.

When we printed in duplex, we did notice the printer reduced the size of the page image. Despite checking that the driver was set to print at a scale of 100%, we couldn't get it to print the page as large as the equivalent single-sided test.

It's possible to hit Kodak's headline figure of 7p per print if you buy paper and the colour cartridge in a special Value Pack. The standard photo paper supplied in this pack is rather thinner than that used by most people, and the Premium Value Pack, which offers thicker paper, brings the price up by about 1p per print. Even so, these are still the cheapest print costs on the market using the manufacturer's inks.

The ESP 7 is a well-specified all-in-one from a manufacturer that should know about printing photos. Its running costs continue to be market leaders and, as long as you can live with the slow and noisy print, it represents rather good value.