Kodak EasyShare 5300: Photos at 10 cents apiece
There is a certain uneasiness from the traditional manufacturers on this market with a newcomer having just upset the relative calm. It’s been five years now that not much has changed in the world of printers. Quality has stabilized as well as the cost of ink. In terms of photos, without any consensus a similar price can be found with many manufacturers and printing a photo comes to 29 cents for paper and ink. Only the HP Photosmart C6180, which was distinguished in our last survey, is the exception at 22 cents.
And now Kodak is here with the magic price of 10 cents per photo, and this is with paper included! Not only does this printer claim to be two or three times cheaper than its rivals, but it actually comes close to discount on-line labs. For office use, the savings are also supposed to be significant. No figures are given here and Kodak just announces that the office print price is "50% inferior to other current leading products".
The « old guard » immediately reacted. Epson ordered an "independent" study from a German lab, which miraculously showed that an Epson printer consumes 80 % of its cartridge’s ink versus 40 % for the Kodak. The reason: The ink wells of the big cartridge don’t empty at all at the same speed. HP also has its say. They didn’t offer any numbers, but insisted on the large waste of ink in all colors, which the Kodak supposedly does in cleaning its print heads. Canon and Lexmark expressed less on the subject, but we can feel in their reactions that Kodak is on the « dark side ».
So why is this such a touchy subject? Because manufacturers have said for years that they cannot lower ink costs due to the extremely high development costs of their products. And this means it’s not too appreciable when someone else, a brand that is rather liked by the public and with a name synonymous with photos, proves the contrary on their first try. The only thing we can be afraid of now is that for this price we obtain quality that is very disappointing.
The EasyShare 5300 has already arrived in the US and England. For a number of other countries some patience will be required, and for example, this means until October for France. So how does this product fare?
This printer underwent our usual batch of tests: autonomy, office print and photo quality, speed, scanning and copies.
