Kodak ESP Office 6150 review

Forget Kodak's curvy home ESP devices; the demands of work mean the new Office 6150 shares the same boxy, ADF-clad design as most other office all-in-ones, albeit with a bit of gloss in places.

An automatic duplex unit squats at the rear of the machine, and the usual USB 2 connection is augmented with an Ethernet port and an 802.11n wireless adapter. Up front sits a 2.4in colour display, with basic print, copy and scan settings alongside various wizards to get networks up and running. There's no card reader, which most consumer devices now feature as standard, and the control panel is a little fiddly, with more complex tasks, such as configuring network connections, made cumbersome by the tough, small buttons.

Once we were all set up, our first prints failed to impress. Text in our mono documents was faded, spindly and crooked; in colour that text became slightly thicker, but graphics were a mile off the excellence of Canon's Pixma MP640.

Photo printing proved even more disappointing, with significant grain across solid areas of colour and banding throughout our gradient tests. Colours weren’t reproduced particularly accurately, skin tones were grey and discoloured, and images had a pale finish that we just wouldn't want to use for prints intended for the outside world.

The Kodak lagged in our speed tests, too. It printed mono documents at 5.3ppm and colour pages at 3.4ppm; quite a bit slower than the Canon's 7.3ppm and 4.6ppm in the same tests. Scan speeds were also middling, although it maintained its steady speed across all connection types.

A big reason not to buy this printer, though, is the high price. The cost per page is its one plus point – 1.2p for mono prints and 2.4p per colour page – but for photos you'll find Kodak's cheap cartridges are more than offset by its expensive photo paper, only the most premium of which is any good at all.

Kodak promotes its good value inks as a real selling point of its ESP range, but there are so many other weaknesses in the ESP Office 6150 that running costs should barely even come into your buying decision. For such a high purchase price, we'd expect vastly better print quality and speeds than this printer can produce.

Author: Mike Jennings