Kodak EasyShare 5300 review

While most of the big inkjet manufacturers have moved to individual ink tanks to make printing more economical, Kodak is turning that approach on its head.

As well as a standard black cartridge for mono documents, Kodak's first foray into the multifunction peripheral (MFP) market - the EasyShare 5300 - has a single 5-in-1 colour cartridge that the company claims has an astonishing running cost of just 7p per photo.

Inside this cartridge sit the usual cyan, magenta and yellow tanks, as well as an extra photo black and a fifth tank of clear gloss to give photos a protective coating. All the tanks are supposedly filled with different amounts of ink to avoid too much wastage of the less-used colours and to keep the cost of the cartridge down. Of course, these calculations assume that you will be printing 'average' prints and not using the less-used colours too much; if you run a print job that uses these colours more then you may have to replace the cartridge early.

Kodak claims that this colour cartridge will print 105 prints at the highest quality setting or 180 at the medium setting, yet it retails for just £9.99. As you might expect, though, there's small print to read.

To achieve the claimed 7p per print you need to buy Kodak's value pack, which consists of a colour cartridge and 180 sheets of Kodak's 3-star Photo paper. If you're just running off the family snaps to stick in an album you'll be fine, but for any other purpose the paper is so thin and insubstantial that we can't see your prints lasting too long. If you print on the far superior 5-star Ultra Premium paper, you'll need to add a whopping 33p per sheet, which starts to make the 5300 look considerably more expensive.

Prints are pretty good, with sharp edges and no visible banding, although all our prints were tinged with a noticeable magenta hue. They also came out extremely quickly, with all six of our 6x4in photos arriving in less than four minutes. If you do a lot of printing and you don't require perfection, the 5300 is a decent enough choice.

The scanner is decent, too. Our test images had accurate colour tones and a good level of detail, and the 5300 kept pace with the best MFPs we reviewed in last month's Labs test. We hoped this would be the same for the copier, too. However, it took 51 seconds just to get a single mono copy and, bizarrely, just 40 seconds for the same copy in colour. The colours appeared washed out, so you might need to tweak the darkness setting in the menu.

If you do so, you'll realise that the control panel is one of the 5300's best features. The high-resolution 3in LCD is excellent, especially for those times when you want to print from a memory card. You shouldn't have to use the screen much, though, as the printer has been designed to minimise the time you'll need to spend trawling through menus. For example, to print on 6x4in photo paper, you merely push the photo tray into the printer until the green light comes on; anything you then print will automatically use that paper until you pull it out and revert to the standard tray.

The 5300 is full of nice design touches such as this. It also includes a pair of USB ports so you can connect extra peripherals, and a print-and-scan calibration procedure that helps familiarise you with the scanner.

The Kodak EasyShare 5300 is clearly aimed at the less-experienced everyday home user rather than the photo enthusiast, especially as the differing costs of Kodak's papers means you'll be able to recoup some of the huge £140 purchase cost only if you're happy to print on the cheapest paper. If you prefer the best possible quality, you should look instead to Canon's PIXMA MP510.