Why You Can Trust CNET Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One review: Kodak Easyshare 5300 All-in-One
It's not surprising that Kodak's foray into cheap AIO printing does its best work with photos. We just wish it did better with text.
Design
While Kodak has a long and historic association with the printed image, as a company it's historically only really dabbled in PC-connected printers, usually with a strict photo-centric outlook. That's not that surprising for a camera company, when you think about it.
Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One
The Good
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The Easyshare 5300 AIO represents a departure for the company, then. While it will certainly handle photo printing, as you'd expect, it's also a fully featured AIO printer of documents, scanner of documents and copier of (you guessed it) documents. And other things during drunk home office parties, but we'll leave that bit up to your imagination.
Speaking of imagination, however, the one striking thing about the 5300, especially as it's a Kodak product, is how essentially plain it looks. It's as though there was a committee of Kodak designers who were told to design an AIO printer. They did so, went back, and were told to make it look more, well, printery. The end result is a very generic AIO unit. That's not a bad thing per se, but given how swish many Kodak products look, the 5300 just seems rather plain and ordinary.
Installation of the 5300 involves the usual routine of unsticking seemingly hundreds of those tiny bits of plastic tape (in the 5300's case, they're bright orange), installing the print head and printer cartridges and printing a calibration page, which must then be scanned. We initially had some trouble getting the printer to accept that we had in fact installed the print head as advised; we're still not entirely sure why it finally accepted that we had.
Features
The 5300 uses a simplified ink system -- only two tanks are ever required -- one smaller black cartridge, and one truly colossal colour/photo unit. This does give the unit simplicity, but at the obvious cost that if you run out of, say, blue, you've got to replace all the colours simultaneously.
It features a three-inch colour display on the right hand side of the top of the printer, memory card slots and the option to add Bluetooth printing via an adaptor. The display can be used for very simple non-PC photo editing from external memory sources.
Most printer manufacturers are keen -- possibly obsessionally so -- for you to use only their inks and papers. Kodak naturally enough doesn't buck this trend; the 5300 is optimised for Kodak Photo Paper, and it's claimed that the printer will sense the paper being used and use optimal print settings for each paper type.
Kodak's big pitch for the 5300 -- you can't in fact miss it, as it's plastered all over the unit's box -- is that it offers cheaper printing. Kodak suggests that the black cartridges (AU$14.99) are good for just under 350 pages with 5 percent ink coverage, and the colour cartridges (AU$24.99) will do around 105 photos. That breaks down in Kodak's world at around 4 cents per black page, or 24 cents for a 10x14cm photo print. Part of that cost saving comes from the fact that the cartridges don't include a print head; whether over time that leads to a gunked up print head requiring a whole new 5300 is something we didn't have 12 months to test.
Drivers are provided for Windows (XP or Vista) or Mac OS X (10.4.8 or better). We initially tried testing on a Mac OS X 10.5, but found the drivers wouldn't fully install; hopefully as Leopard is so new (at the time of writing) this will be rectified soon. We had no problems installing under Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
Performance
Kodak claim a print speed of up to 32ppm for monochrome printing, and up to 22ppm for colour with the 5300. Like most manufacturer claims, we took this with a grain of salt, and applied a common document to the 5300 for testing purposes. Our moderately complex test document took 48 seconds to print its first copy, and only managed a meagre 1.25ppm in our tests.
The other facet of the 5300's offering is naturally enough photo printing. Here the 5300 performed much better, spitting out very good quality 4x6 photos in around one minute a piece, even for complex print jobs. While we do see photo labs offering better priced deals than the typical 24 cents/print cost claimed by Kodak, it's never by that much, and the convenience of being able to pick and choose your photos at home, and at your leisure, can't be overstated.
As you'd expect from Kodak, the 5300 does its best work with photographs. As a direct document printer, it's a little less exciting, but anything that forces the cost of prints down in a competitive market deserves applause.