Kodak ESP-7 All-in-One Printer Review

The Printer & Setup

As you have seen in Figure 4, the printer itself is a fairly large boxy device with rounded corners. The printer top, sides, and back are a frosted black finish. The top is adorned with small shiny black squares in a design which lends a slightly stylish look to the printer. The front panel, including the touch screen is a shiny black surface. The printer is 17.5” wide × 7.4” high × 17” deep (44.5 cm x 19 cm x 43 cm). The top of the printer measures only 12” (30 cm) deep, but a bump out in the front and back, as seen in Figure 6, add several inches to its actual depth. The printer weighs in at 18.7 pounds (8.5 kg).

Figure 6: The bump outs.

The flat bed and top of the printer lift to expose the print head and ink cartridges, as shown in Figure 7.

If you follow the included Start Here Guide, the printer setup is easy. It can be attached to one computer via USB cable, attached to a network via Ethernet cable, or setup wirelessly on a wireless network. The USB cable and/or Ethernet cable is not included. For the setup, you will need a USB cable if you want to hook one computer up directly to the printer. You will, however, also need to hook the printer up to a computer by USB cable to perform any firmware updates that may be necessary.

Figure 7: The inside of the printer.

While many printers require that you hook the computer and printer up with a USB cable in order to get it on a wireless network, the ESP-7 does not have this requirement. So if you are putting it on your wireless network, no USB cable is required. In fact, this printer was one of the easiest we’ve seen to get on a wireless network. It immediately saw the network and connected. An on-screen keyboard let’s you enter the password if your network is encrypted. The only problem you may have is that the printer keyboard that is used to enter the password is set to default to CAPS. Most people do not use all caps for their password, so you may have to tap a button to make the keyboard revert to small letters.

This was one of the easiest printer setups that we’ve seen. Total installation including hooking the printer up to a wireless network took less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, when it was completed, the printer would not print. It went through all the motions of printing, but produced only blank pages. We immediately thought of a bad print head, but decided to contact Kodak to see what troubleshooting they required. Although the Kodak website said that online chat was to be available 24/7, when we tried to use it we were given a message saying that online chat was “unavailable.” Luckily, Kodak’s telephone number was clearly given in the Start Here Guide.

The Kodak representative was polite and intelligent. Although he had a foreign accent, his English was understandable. After a 25-minute telephone troubleshooting call, he decided that we needed a new print head. He ordered it and said it would arrive in 3 days, which it did. With the new print head installed, the printer worked just fine.

We can’t be certain whether this was an isolated event or not, but this year’s Printers Service & Reliability Survey 2009 by PC Magazine, shows that Kodak’s percentage of products needing repairs is the highest on the marketplace at 31%. That is almost one in three Kodak printers needing repair, which indicates that this may be a commonplace occurrence with this batch of Kodak printers.

Once working, the ESP-7 was easy to operate. As you can see in Figure 8, the large 3" color LCD display is bright and clear. In this Figure, you can also see all of the printer’s controls. On the left side is the On/Off button. Under that is the network status light. To the right are the Menu button and the Zoom buttons that lets you zoom in and out of a photograph. The main menu has several choices: Copy Document, Copy Photos, View and Print Photos, Scan, Network Settings, Printer Settings, Maintenance, and Help. Scrolling is done by the 4-way navigation buttons to the right of the screen. The OK button in the center of the 4-way buttons confirms the choice. The Cancel button
on the right will cancel the function, while the Start button will start the operation.

Each menu choice will bring up more choices like the number of copies, the type of copies (color or black and white), etc. Although there are many nested menus, they are easy to navigate.

The front of the Kodak ESP-7 also sports slots for the major types of memory cards including Compact Flash, SD (Secure Digital), MMC (Multimedia Card), and xD (xD Picture Card), and Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro, as shown in Figure 9. There is also a USB port that is PictBridge compatible. The idea is that you can plug your media card directly into the printer, view your pictures, and print them.

Our problem was that the printer would only read certain media cards on a hit or miss basis. It read some Compact Flash cards, but not others. The same thing happened with other types of memory cards.

Figure 9: The memory card slots.

This forced us to go to Kodak tech support once again. This time the online chat was available. After many questions, we were told that the printer needed a firmware update and you had to attach it to a computer with a USB cable to do that. We did. The firmware would not update. After 1 hour in the chat, the representative was willing to go farther into investigating why we could not update the firmware through the typical methods. Since this was projected to take at least another hour, maybe more, so we decided not to pursue it for our test machine. The problem remained unsolved. Our take is that a brand new printer shouldn’t cause this much trouble.

We went on to test out the rest of the printer. We found that the legal-size main tray holds 100 sheets of paper and can accommodate many other media types. Above the main tray is a supplemental piggybacked photo tray that holds 40 sheets of 5-by-7-inch (13 x 18 cm) or smaller photo paper. You can see both trays in Figure 10. Unfortunately, both of these trays are under the tray where the print jobs eject and you have to lift the tray each time you want to add more paper. It’s not terrible, but it’s not the greatest design.

Figure 10: The paper trays.

The paper try arrangement is also problematic for printing envelopes as you have to remove any existing paper from the standard paper tray and put the envelope in the tray and then slide the paper guides to hold the envelop in place.