EasyShare 5500 All-In-One

The Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One's poky speed and high price detract from this multifunction printer's useful small-office/home-office and shutterbug features.

The Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One takes all major camera-card formats. The control panel's tiltable, 2.4in colour LCD displays photos from your inserted media. The menus offer basic printing choices such as layout and quantity; you also get control-panel buttons for rotating the photo or zooming in on a specific area to print.

Kodak's bundled EasyShare software helps you organise and edit your photos. The printer even auto-senses the paper type and adjusts its quality accordingly, although it malfunctioned on our test Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One -- rejecting Kodak's own papers. Kodak subsequently issued a firmware upgrade to resolve this issue.

The Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One offers a decent set of small-office features, notably a 35-sheet ADF and an automatic duplexer. Networking is its big deficit -- it has only USB (Bluetooth is a pay-for option). The 100-sheet input tray is smaller than we'd like, but not unusual for the category.

Copy functions (from the Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One's control panel only) cover a good range of choices, and copy quality itself is good. Scan quality is acceptable, and the scanning from either the control panel or software is easy. Kodak's AiO Home Center offers a centralised interface for scanning and photo functions, as well as settings and other information.

The Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One's control panel is logically laid out with clearly labelled buttons, including ones to initiate each major function. There's no button for going back or undoing something, however, and it can be hard to tell whether you're supposed to press the OK or Start button, especially in Photo mode.

As with all inkjet multifunction printers we've tested, the Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One is a lot slower in default mode than its top-speed, draft-mode specs would suggest.

The Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One managed a lacklustre 6.2 pages per minute (ppm) printing plain-black text, and a poky 2ppm printing graphics. Text on plain paper looked good: charcoal rather than black, but fairly precise otherwise. Graphics printed on plain paper seemed a tad faded, while on photo paper everything was a little dark. On both papers, images still looked natural.

The Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-In-One is noteworthy for its low-priced ink replacements. There's a separate black for text, plus a colour cartridge with five tanks for cyan, magenta, yellow, photo black, and a clear protective coating.