Directory  Reviews Printer Reviews |
| KODAK EASYSHARE 5500 All-In-One. |
|
|
|
Page 5 of 6 Printing capabilities Our printing tests are essentially a rehash of the methodology we used with the 5300, and as such the results of our tests are similar. Considering that from a printing and scanning standpoint all three printers are essentially identical this stands to reason. As we stated in the 5300 review, 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 is 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. These results were not suprisingly identical to the tests we conducted earlier this year on the 5300. Measured speeds of a 4x6 photo print on premium Kodak paper were 36 seconds, and 1:33 seconds on a full size 8.5x11 print, and similar to the speeds we saw with the 5300. For the document feeder, to give you some sort of idea of the printers speed at dealing with draft speed copies, we loaded it with 20 sheets of print-out (specifically the first 20 pages of the above mentioned game walkthru), and timed its speed at scanning and printing out copies. The stopwatched end result took approximately 1:55 from start to finish, which is respectable, though not exactly a speed demon. Hardly any home-office AIO printers excel in this area compared to a dedicated copying machine though. For casual copying the speed is quite adequate, but for bulk copying we'd recommend a dedicated copier. As far as its faxing capabilities, the Kodak 5500 is a pretty feature rich fax machine. Supporting black and white and color faxing, queing and time scheduling, a 12-button phone key pad, three one-click speed dials, and a 60 quick-dial number phone book it is as feature packed as your average standalone inkjet fax machine. We're still disappointed with its lack of operating system integrated fax emulation however. 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.              |
||||||||