Kodak ESP 7 review

Kodak has heavily promoted the ESP 7 MFP on its print costs, with lots of examples versus rival printers.

It's more expensive than most home MFPs but has more features, too. It has a bright 3in colour screen, an automatic duplexer and support for direct printing and scanning via PictBridge and various memory card slots. You can connect to it using a wired or wireless network as well as via USB. After we'd installed the print heads and ink, an automatic alignment page was printed. Software installation was simple and the driver immediately detected the printer on our network.

At first glance, it looks as if Kodak is right about the print costs. When we calculated page costs using the ISO 24711 page yield figures we got a cost of 2p per black page and 2.6p per three-colour page, producing a remarkably low mixed-colour total of 4.6p. However, the ESP 7 uses a combined colour cartridge for photo and colour document printing, with four pigment-based inks and a clear overcoat for photos. It means you'll have to replace the cartridge as soon as any one colour runs out. If you print a lot of images of blue sea and sky, for example, the cyan ink could run out well before others.

We don't use the ISO page yield tests, which have five per cent of each colour. Instead, our test pages are real documents, which are a fairer representation of the sort of colour prints made by a typical user. The ESP 7 printed 152 pages before we had to replace the cartridge. This meant colour pages work out at 6.6p from the £10 colour cartridge and mixed-colour costs of 8.6p per page. This is fairly good, but not as inexpensive as Kodak's quoted costs. It highlights that print costs can vary depending on how evenly the inks are used.

Kodak quotes a photo yield of 173 6x4in prints for the ESP 7's colour cartridge. This equates to an ink cost of 5.8p and, with Kodak Ultra Premium photo paper at 24p per sheet, a total cost per photo of just under 30p. This is slightly more than most of the photo printers in our last group test (Labs, Shopper 257).

Standard-quality text was dark and sharp. Draft prints were clear and readable, although not as dark. Photos had realistic colours, but were a little grainy. The 2,400dpi scanner worked perfectly over our network and the driver software is easy to use, with a decent range of features. Scans were accurate but surprisingly grainy.

The ESP 7 has an excellent range of features and is easy to use. Print costs are reasonable, despite the combined colour cartridge. Its print and scan quality isn't particularly remarkable, though. Although Canon's Pixma MP240 (below) is much cheaper and has better print quality, it lacks many of the ESP 7's features and costs more to run. If you need a network-capable MFP for home use, the ESP 7 is a good choice.