Printing Tests 

We got a little carried away perhaps with print tests, but we wanted to do the printer proper justice. Overwhelmingly a home or small office AIO printer will be used to print and scan basic black and white documents, to do the same with presentation quality documents, and finally photos. The emphasis here with Kodak is clearly on photo printing, and that's what we'll spend the most time doing and testing, but we did do some basic tests of other capabilities as well.

For draft mode black and white tests, we used two text files. One, located here, is a downloaded plain text file. It's a rather long dense single spaced walkthru/faq for a game. The second file was an MS Word document located here, which was our attempt to approximate the sort of document they likely used in their speed tests to achieve their "up to 32ppm" speed rating. We simply stopwatch timed the printer from the moment it loaded a sheet of paper for a period of 120 seconds counted the number of sheets printed, and divided by two. In the case of the second MS Word document we loaded up 100 copies of the page to print, as it wasn't as long as the plain text file.

The dense single spaced text file ended up printing at a rate of 14ppm, while the less dense MS Word doc ended up printing at 27ppm, which approaches the manufacturers claimed maximum. Such speed ratings by manufacturers are usually predicated on 5% of page coverage, and we're just not sure if the MS Word document approached that level of density. Still, draft mode printing is plenty fast. Impromptu measured speeds of a 4x6 photo print on premium Kodak paper were 37 seconds, and 1:37 seconds on a full size 8.5x11 print. Impressively quick in our experience.

We also did some text printouts of our website press kit, available here, using normal mode. We used two types of papers. We used Kodak standard Ink jet paper, and Office Depot el-cheapo copy paper. We then scanned these pages in at 600dpi using the flatbed scanner, then created identical crop regions so that you could take a look at close-up detail. With the naked eye the print quality is plenty sharp on either paper, and even scanned and zoomed in you can see the print quality is quite good, though the copy paper sample on the left suffers from a little bit of bleed, being used in a way it's not best designed for.

For the photo quality tests, we used either 4x6 premium photo paper or 8.5x11 premium photo paper. Our method of comparison is similar to what we did in the draft and normal text tests above. We printed out the sample pictures below, then created custom crop regions and compared original digital source files to the 600 dpi scanned print output. To size pictures to similar resolutions, we used Irfanview 3.99, and used Bicubic Spline Interpolation and the Lossless JPEG plug in so that scaling, cropping, and saving would have as little impact on the images as possible. Below are resolution reduced samples of the images we used. Due to their enormous file sizes should anyone wish to examine the originals, we've decided to just make them available upon request.

The first image is a color and tone test picture, originally 8.2megapixel. Secondly we use an image of flowers we took with our Nikon L2 digital camera at 6megapixel resolution. The last two are stock photos we obtained, which are originally 6 and 10 mega pixel respectively.

First we look at our floral picture, taken with our own Nikon L2. As we stated above, we took the printed picture, which was a 4x6, and scanned it in at 600dpi. We then created a custom crop selection and matched the area to the original digital photo for comparison. To the naked eye the 4x6 was stunning with no banding or any other obvious giveaways that it was printed on an ink jet. Naturally this is as much due to the paper as it is the printer, but it's an impressive combination to our eyes. You can see some of the dithering patterns used in the cropped scan, but they are fairly uniform and not "noisy".

Next we take the color and tone test picture and print it to 8.5x11 paper. Since the paper's aspect ratio isn't the same as the original photograph, some of the top and bottom of the final printout was cropped. We did this on purpose so we'd be getting as much out of this 8.2megapixel picture as possible on the paper. We then cropped two sections out of both the original and scanned print for comparison. The printed "gears" section of the photograph ended up a little "warmer" than the original, but still quite good. Though the dithering is noticeable when looking at it scanned, the actual 8.5x11 ended up being nearly indistinguishable from what we'd expect to see in an emulsion print from film. Likewise with the cropped "color chart" section.

Finally we dealt with the 6 megapixel and 10 megapixel stock photos in the same manner. And as above, we came to the same overall conclusions as they relate to quality. The scans reveal the dithering patterns one would expect to see, but to the naked eye they're just difficult to notice at all. Likewise the actual full size 8.5x11 prints showed none of the obvious "gotcha's" one usually sees with ink jet photo prints.

It's clear in our testing that Kodak's done their homework, as well they should have. It'd be pretty embarrassing for the historical juggernaut of photography to screw up a product so key to their all-digital strategy for the home. So what do we think? Let's wrap this up!