Software and Drivers

Installing the printer drivers and the Easyshare AIO software suite included on CD was a painless affair, about as complicated as installing any other USB device. We installed the printer on an Intel Core 2 E6300 machine with 2GB of DDR2, running Windows XP SP2. We didn't do anything major in the way of color calibration, apart from using Adobe Gamma to create an sRGB profile for the monitor. The printer has one unique feature that we found ourselves impressed with. When powering up the system with a new color cartridge installed, the printer prompts you to create a calibration sheet on 4x6 paper (samples of paper are included with the printer). It then prompts you to scan the resulting print on the flatbed, and calibrates the scanner to the printer and to the printer driver. Nice touch!

The printer control panel itself is fairly straightforward to understand, with several preset defaults you can use based on the type of paper your working with. A very nice touch is the printer supporting border less printing, all the way up to letter sized prints. Before we forget to mention this, Kodak's own papers are watermarked on the back. Why? The Easyshare printers use a CCD image sensor that automatically detects the presence of Kodak brand papers and auto adjusts the print quality settings to suit the paper being used. Saves a lot of fiddling with drivers.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice you do not see any traditional "resolution" settings. Kodak apparently has done this on purpose for several reasons. Firstly, because of the way ink jet printers themselves function. Using color combining, half toning and dithering routines to approximate colors, a printers stated resolution may not have any realistic correlation to its measurable output quality. (note: a similar situation exists in emulsion film. Film negatives may have measurable resolution in the thousands in lines-per-inch, but most lab papers and processes are lucky to resolve a few hundred lines per inch.). Secondly, most people generally use only a few settings in their printers driver. So the driver's "simplification" isn't as big a deal as it might seem. Still, being the curious sorts we are, we're still left scratching our heads wondering what the comparable dot resolution of this printer is. It's stated nowhere, not even in Kodak's official specifications. Later on when we get to print quality tests, we'll see if this even matters.

The included Kodak AIO Home Center software is nice, and allows you to perform most any basic or medium complexity task with the printer. The printer itself supports the standard Windows printing system, as well as TWAIN and WIA access capabilities for accessing the scanner, the memory card ports, or the USB ports from all software that supports those standards, which is basically everything that deals with digital images. Still for your average tasks much of what you'd want to do can be handled quite effectively within the AIO Home Center interface. One neat feature of the scanning software is the fact you can scan multiple pictures at the same time. The software intelligently determines there are multiple pics on the scanner platen and allows you to import or save them individually. A potentially big timesaver.

The interface also allows you to start up Kodak's Easyshare software, which is an image management system for cataloging photo galleries, creating slide shows, uploading galleries to Kodak's Easyshare website, and even for requesting high quality prints from Kodak. As a photo management application it's quite intuitive and easy to use, but we're sort of stubborn and have gotten used to using Google's free Picasa application for our picture inventory needs. Still, it's very good and should suffice for most people. Easyshare does include some modest image editing and adjustment capabilities, which are far easier and far more suited to manipulating digital photographs than more complex applications like Photoshop. The whole goal here seems to be making the process of dealing with digital photographs and printing a fairly painless affair, and after a week with the software we'd have to say they pulled this off quite well.

You can also order supplies for your printer through the AIO Home Center, and check for and download printer firmware updates and software driver updates. There was an available firmware update for our test unit, and we installed it without drama from the Easyshare interface, though we had no clue what issues it may have resolved.

As you can see, it's quite a seamless package when it comes to controls on the hardware and software side of things. But....how does it print? That's next...