Kodak ESP Office 6150 review

£167
Price when reviewed

Forget Kodak’s curvy home ESP devices; the demands of work mean the new Office 6150 shares the same boxy, ADF-clad design as most other office all-in-ones, albeit with a bit of gloss in places.

Kodak ESP Office 6150 review

An automatic duplex unit squats at the rear of the machine, and the usual USB 2 connection is augmented with an Ethernet port and an 802.11n wireless adapter. Up front sits a 2.4in colour display, with basic print, copy and scan settings alongside various wizards to get networks up and running. There’s no card reader, which most consumer devices now feature as standard, and the control panel is a little fiddly, with more complex tasks, such as configuring network connections, made cumbersome by the tough, small buttons.

Kodak ESP Office 6150

Once we were all set up, our first prints failed to impress. Text in our mono documents was faded, spindly and crooked; in colour that text became slightly thicker, but graphics were a mile off the excellence of Canon’s Pixma MP640.

Photo printing proved even more disappointing, with significant grain across solid areas of colour and banding throughout our gradient tests. Colours weren’t reproduced particularly accurately, skin tones were grey and discoloured, and images had a pale finish that we just wouldn’t want to use for prints intended for the outside world.

The Kodak lagged in our speed tests, too. It printed mono documents at 5.3ppm and colour pages at 3.4ppm; quite a bit slower than the Canon’s 7.3ppm and 4.6ppm in the same tests. Scan speeds were also middling, although it maintained its steady speed across all connection types.

A big reason not to buy this printer, though, is the high price. The cost per page is its one plus point – 1.2p for mono prints and 2.4p per colour page – but for photos you’ll find Kodak’s cheap cartridges are more than offset by its expensive photo paper, only the most premium of which is any good at all.

Kodak promotes its good value inks as a real selling point of its ESP range, but there are so many other weaknesses in the ESP Office 6150 that running costs should barely even come into your buying decision. For such a high purchase price, we’d expect vastly better print quality and speeds than this printer can produce.

Details

Speed rating 3

Basic Specifications

Colour? yes
Resolution printer final 4800 x 1200dpi
Integrated TFT screen? yes
Rated/quoted print speed 22PPM
Maximum paper size A4
Duplex function yes

Running costs

Cost per A4 mono page 1.2p
Cost per A4 colour page 2.4p
Ink type Dye-based

Power and noise

Dimensions 445 x 427 x 236mm (WDH)

Copier Specification

Fax? yes
Fax speed 33.6Kb/sec
Fax page memory 100

Performance tests

6x4in photo print time 40s
A4 photo print time 1min 52s
Mono print speed (measured) 5ppm
Colour print speed 3ppm

Media Handling

Borderless printing? yes
CD/DVD printing? no
Input tray capacity 200 sheets
Output tray capacity 100 sheets

Connectivity

USB connection? yes
Ethernet connection? yes
Bluetooth connection? no
PictBridge port? no
Other connections N/A

Flash media

SD card reader no
Compact Flash reader no
Memory Stick reader no
xD-card reader no
USB flash drive support? no

OS Support

Operating system Windows 7 supported? yes
Operating system Windows Vista supported? yes
Operating system Windows XP supported? yes
Operating system Windows 2000 supported? yes
Operating system Windows 98SE supported? yes
Software supplied Kodak EasyShare Suite

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