Kodak ESP 3.2 review

The Kodak ESP 3.2 is an entry-level all-in-one model that includes print, copy and scan features as well as Wi-Fi connectivity.

It'll set you back a reasonable £79, and Kodak also claims it's up there with the lowest running costs of any inkjet printer on the market.

Design and features

Like most of the printers around at the moment, the ESP 3.2 is predominantly clad in black. Kodak has used a matte rather than glossy finish, and this does a good job of repelling fingerprints. To brighten things up, a couple of flashes of yellow have been splashed on the scanner lid and the paper protector at the back.

Paper is loaded into a vertical paper tray at the rear and all printed material emerges from a pull-out tray at the front. Both of these trays can be folded into the body of the printer when it's not in use to reduce its footprint for storing away.

This model has a 4.8x3.6cm screen, which is larger than the one on the cheaper ESP 1.2 model, and this display also supports touch input. As a result it's a got a neater interface that is built around larger touch buttons, making it more immediate to use.

Just beneath the screen there's a multi format card reader that accepts Memory Stick, MMC and SD cards, but this model lacks a PictBridge USB port.

The touchscreen makes this model quite easy to use.

Set-up

You can choose to connect the ESP 3.2 to your computer either directly via a USB cable or instead by connecting it into your home network using Wi-Fi. If you choose the latter you can set up the printer to join your network directly via its touchscreen. However, you still need to install the drivers on your PC using the supplied CD.

Once the printer is on your network you can also download the Kodak Pic Flick app for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices to print photos directly from your smartphone or tablet. Unfortunately, though, the printer doesn't natively support Apple's AirPrint.

You can also set up this printer to work with cloud printing services, such as Kodak's own Email print service or Google's Cloud Print. The former allows you to email print jobs to the EPS 3.2 from any PC or mobile device anywhere in the world, while the latter allows you to print directly from Google services like Gmail and Google Docs, from any internet connected PC.

Scanning and copying

The flatbed scanner on the top of the ESP 3.2 produces reasonably good looking scans, as it captures pretty accurate colours and sharp detail in photos. It even does a fairly good job on similar tones at the darker end of the colour spectrum -- something that lesser all-in-one models often struggle with.

As a photocopier, this model isn't all that speedy, though. It took a fairly leisurely 24 seconds to copy our black and white test document.

Print speed, quality and cost

The EPS 3.2's performance isn't bad in terms of print speed for a model in its price range, but neither is it particularly fast. Cnet's 10-page black and white A4 document took 1 minute 28 seconds to print, while the 10-page presentation test took 2 minutes 31 seconds to emerge. Ten copies of our colour graphics document were completed in a pretty languid 3 minutes 14 seconds and it wasn't massively quick for photo printing either, taking 52 seconds to produce a 4x6-inch photo.

The touchscreen makes this model quite easy to use.

Its print quality is perfectly acceptable, though, as characters are quite cleanly formed. I felt text could have been a little darker, however. Colours on the graphics test weren't as bright and bold as I would have liked, and there was some very slight banding on big blocks of colour in the business presentation test. On both these tests, detail levels were good though.

Photo reproduction is also impressive by the standards of a four ink printer as it handled trickier, darker areas of our test image quite well.

This model uses just two ink cartridges -- one for black and one for colour. Using the higher capacity XL and CL cartridges, running costs work out at 2.5p per sheet for a black and white page and 4.4p per sheet for a colour page. Both of these figures included 0.6p for paper costs. While there are other budget inkjet printers form rival manufacturers that can match it's black and white page costs, this model is cheaper than most of its similarly priced competitors when it comes to colour printing.

Conclusion

The Kodak ESP 3.2 isn't the fastest printer around and neither does it produce the best quality output I've seen. However, it's still a decent all rounder for the price, and is definitely worth a look if you tend to print a lot of colour pages, due to its lower running costs.