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Kodak’s ESP Office 2170 is a compact inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) aimed at home workers and micro businesses. It’s not as smart looking as some of the competition, notably devices from Epson and Canon, but it’s not bad either; its textured black plastics, livened up with a silver backplate around the controls and a flash of Kodak yellow at the front of the scanner lid, are easy on the eye.
The 2170 includes most of the features that a small business might need, including the basics of print, scan, copy and fax. The latter two take advantage of a 25-page automatic document feeder (ADF), enabling unattended multi-page copies or transmissions. There’s also support for wireless networking, although not wired Ethernet. Like most MFPs we test, the 2170 supports direct photo printing via PictBridge USB and various camera memory cards, but we doubt this is high in the list of priorities for most start-ups. The only notable omission is automatic duplex (double-sided) printing.
This is a simple product to use, with print and scanner drivers that are straightforward. The printer’s own control buttons are similarly clear and simple, though they bleep irritatingly with each press until you find how to turn it off. The small screen is clear from most angles; important given that neither it nor the control panel in which it’s mounted will pivot.
The 2170 is based on the same print engine as the Kodak ESP C310 we reviewed last month. As such, it’s no surprise to find that its performance was nearly identical in our tests. Although it’s quite fast when printing draft text, it’s less competitive at its standard quality settings, with 25 copies of our formal letter taking nearly six and a half minutes. At 2.9 pages per minute (ppm), the rate of graphics-rich colour printing was adequate, while postcard-sized photo prints were reasonably fast, each taking a minute.
The printer shares the C310’s foibles: its black text exhibited subtle horizontal ‘tearing’, and we couldn’t eliminate the borders from photos. We also noticed some banding in colour graphics on plain paper and in photos, but overall the quality was acceptable for office use. The scanner is better, and subtly improved over that in the C310. Its speeds were quite reasonable on all but our 1,200dpi resolution test, and although the focus of images wasn’t as sharp as we’d like, colours were accurate and there was noticeably better preservation of the lightest and darkest details of the originals.
Without doubt, the strongest argument in favour of the 2170 is its running costs which, like those of the C310, are about as low as we’ve seen for an inkjet. Using Kodak’s high-capacity black cartridges, each mono page should cost only about a penny and each colour page less than three pence. While it may not be the slickest or best MFP, these low costs coupled with its reasonable purchase price make it a good choice if your new business needs an everyday multifunction printer.
