The Kodak Easyshare 5300 arrived a little over a week ago, and the first impression we got of the printer was just how heavy it was. The specifications list it as weighing 21.3 pounds and we believe every ounce of it. This is a good first impression to us, as it implies a level of quality in the construction of the unit. We've played with Lexmark AIO printers that didn't weigh half of what this printer weighs. Inside the top of the box you find the "getting started" essentials. Here on the top of the printer, you find the black and color cartridge, the print head, power supply, a very thorough vinyl covered foldout setup guide, and the software CD for installing Kodak's Easyshare software suite and the printer driver. The printer driver supports XP, Vista (yay!), and MacOS 10.4.8.

Notably absent, and this ALWAYS annoys us, is a USB cable. Kodak, do the right thing (a thing no printer manufacturer does to be fair) and include a USB cable that costs you 50 cents, instead of making the consumer who forgets this make a second trip for an overpriced $10 cable. We stole one from our aging Canon MFC 755 to save a trip to Best Buy.

Once it's out of the box, you can see the printer is sizable. Plan on devoting a good bit of desktop space for this printer. Actual assembly was relatively simple, and not a long drawn out affair. It basically involved removing a few pieces of protective tape, installing the permanent print head, and installing the ink cartridges. The print head is meant to be a permanent installation, and is supposed to last the working lifetime of the printer itself. It's here where much of the innovation in the printer's design takes place. According to this blog by Cathie Burke, a Kodak employee, the MEMS print head in the Kodak Easyshare series is designed and manufactured as a monolithic structure which purportedly increases both it's accuracy and longevity.

Kodak uses a two cartridge system for their Easyshare printers. One black cartridge for text and black and white printing, and one 5-ink tank for color and photo printing. We say 5 ink rather than 5 color for a reason. The color tank is actually a 4 color tank, featuring photo black, cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. The fifth "ink" is actually a clear coat, used as a final finish process when printing color photos, guaranteeing print uniformity and supposedly enhancing the lifetime of prints.

The paper input and output tray is located at the front of the unit, with the bottom 50 sheet tray accepting most any standard paper size up to 8.5x14 legal. There is a pull-out extension for dealing with legal size paper, and it also helps at "catching" printout. Lightweight el-cheapo copy-quality paper literally flies out of the printer. Normal weight papers and photo paper do not suffer from this as badly thankfully. What's nice is Kodak included a special 4x6 paper tray, as this is the most popular size people print photo's at. Once loaded with paper and slid inward, the printer automatically knows and notifies the driver/application that your printing on 4x6 paper. And sliding it out reverts the printer/driver to whatever it's initial settings were. All of the components of the paper tray have a nice and solid feel to them, unlike many other printers in our experience.

The printer's included flatbed scanner is naturally located on the top, with an 8.5x11.7 inch scanning surface. The scanner itself has a maximum resolution of 1200dpi. Although this seems lower than some flatbeds that claim resolutions of up to 9600dpi, the reality is that most all scanners max out at 600 or 1200dpi actual scanning resolution, and use software or hardware interpolation for these extreme resolutions. We prefer to do our interpolative scaling in Photoshop where you should be doing it anyway. The scanner platen is also capable of handling thick media such as books, due to the risers built into the scanner platen's hinge mechanism. Again, like the paper tray, the scanner top has a nice solid and sturdy feel to it.

Around to the back of the printer, you'll find the USB and power cable ports. The power brick thankfully has a very long cord, and a separate plug in cable so you don't have yet another over sized brick taking up precious socket space on your power strip or UPS unit. Still, your stuck fending for yourself for a USB cable. Sigh...

Also along the back you find something very nice, a removable backplate, for clearing printer jams.

The Easyshare series of printers is meant to have significant capabilities of scanning and copying without the need of a PC, and this functionality starts up front. On the right hand side is a flash media reader, which supports most all types of flash media devices. Below this are two USB 2.0 ports, and these support any USB devices with Mass Storage or PictBridge support, which basically includes almost all digital cameras and USB flash drives. They also support Bluetooth 1.2 dongles for printing via Bluetooth from a PC or other supporting Bluetooth devices.

The actual controls are located on the top right, and feature a bright pop-up 3inch LCD screen. Navigating it's menu's for scanning and copying is pretty straightforward, and you can actually do most of your scanning and copying from this interface without any need to bother with the PC. Cropping, rotation, image enhancement, red eye removal, resolution, and output paper sizes are only some of the capabilities of the control interface.

Let's move on and take a closer look at the software bundle and drivers...