KODAK EASYSHARE 5500 All-In-One. - FastSilicon.com

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KODAK EASYSHARE 5500 All-In-One.

Article Index
KODAK EASYSHARE 5500 All-In-One.
Specifications
Inside The Box
Software And Drivers
Printing Capabilities
Conclusions

Page 4 of 6

Software And Drivers

The included driver and software bundle for the Easyshare 5500 is identical to the software included with the 5300 and 5100. We installed the printer on the same Intel Core 2 E6300 machine with 2GB of DDR2 that we did the 5300, though in this instance we were running Vista Ultimate Edition. Like the 5300 review 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 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 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 is 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 is 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 as was the case in the 5300 review, and we installed it without drama from the Easyshare interface, though like the 5300 instance we had no clue what issues it may have resolved.

What's missing? Well if you were looking for fax capabilities integrated into the Windows environment your out of luck. The Easyshare 5500's fax capabilities are strictly as a standalong fax machine. As it stands if you have any documents on your PC you need to fax, you have to print them out first and then fax them externally on the device. Admittedly this is the norm in AIO printers, but we would have liked to see this feature nonetheless.

Next we examine its printing and scanning capabilities...

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