It's been hard to escape the onslaught of Kodak TV advertisements recently that stress the cost savings in ink usage by using a Kodak All-in-One printer, and it's not just ink savings that are stressed in the latest in the range, the ESP 5250, which is a natural successor to last year's ESP 5.

In fact, at first glance you might even think it was the same printer, as the external jet black casing design is virtually identical, along with the dimpled patterning on the scanner lid, the LCD top right with a string of control buttons down the side and the compact, front-loading, fixed paper feeder. However, the closer you examine it, the more you realise how much has been removed rather than added from its predecessor.

Although the exterior dimensions are exactly the same (422 x 300 x 175 mm), the LCD display has now inexplicably shrunk from 3.0 to 2.4 inches and the commands are still pretty basic. There's a slight change in the controls, with the Menu button now called Home and new Rotate and Back options.

When you move to the front, on the other hand, you notice straight away that some of the memory card options have vanished: there's now no xD or CompactFlash slot and even more importantly, the USB port has disappeared, so there's no way of inputting flash cards or PictBridge enabled cameras. This is a big loss, as most of the competition have USB slots as standard.

Paper capacity remains at 100 sheets with the tray having to fulfil both input and output functions: another minor annoyance as you constantly have to swap out different paper types. The internal mechanism also stays unchanged, with two cartridges (black and multicolour) that clip neatly into the printhead - we had to run our own head cleaning procedure to start with, as the initial pages came out blank - and the rather flimsy plastic support to hold the lid open.

So much for the negatives. The good news is that you have Wi-Fi capability and this proved to be easy to set up using the supplied software disk, and performed flawlessly after that. Even better, the quality of the photo images in particular has improved dramatically from the earlier model, being generally much sharper (especially printing direct from an SD card) and with only a faint pink hue on even A4 copies. The colours are not overly saturated and have little variation from the originals, while black text overall is solid, although there is some unmistakeable feathering in Draft mode.

Speeds in the ESP range have never broken any records and you'll certainly have time to make cups of tea when Best mode text documents creep out at 2.5ppm (Draft quality is a more respectable 14ppm). Interestingly, both copying and printing speeds for A4 colour prints (unusually, there's only one quality setting for these) were the same at around two minutes if using Kodak's proprietary Home Centre software, yet we managed it 15 seconds faster using the native settings on our PC. 10x15cm photos came out quicker at 30 seconds each, which is perfectly acceptable for this class of printer.

Verdict
Kodak's upgrade for the ESP 5 is a curious trade-off in order to keep the price low, losing memory card and USB input options and gaining Wi-Fi and a marked improvement in photo quality.

Company: Kodak

Contact: 01442 261122

Tags: pictbridge eastman kodak universal serial bus multifunction printer liquid crystal display secure digital wi-fi compactflash