Kodak ESP Office 2170 printer-scanner-fax multifunction device

Kodak's ESP Office 2170 is a compact 'multifunction device' that will print, scan and copy in black and white or colour.

The inkjet printer section takes up the bulk of the device, with a flatbed scanner sitting on the top. The scanner's lid doubles as a 25-sheet automatic document feeder so you can scan or copy multiple sheets at once.

The whole scanner/document feeder section hinges so the user can insert the supplied plastic print head and two ink cartridges. The device uses Kodak's good-value ‘30' ink cartridges which, at internet prices, give impressive costs per page of 2.1p for black and 3.6p for colour.

Paper feeds through from a holder at the rear which is set up for A4 sheets (it can hold 150 sheets) and printed sheets come out at the front. Both the input and output trays have plastic extendable sections to support the paper properly though they increase the amount of space it uses.

There are three print modes: draft, normal and best. In draft mode for black text pages it was speedy at 7.7 pages per minute (ppm), while in normal mode it made a slow 3.3ppm and in best a positively sluggish 1.4ppm (it printed normal-mode colour pages at 3.2ppm).

Draft mode was light but good enough for unimportant documents, and best-mode and normal-mode test both looked good – in fact, we had to look at them under the lab microscope to distinguish them. There was slightly less ink spatter in best mode, but it's not worth the extra time it takes. The image below shows the three print samples under the microscope.

Being an 'office' model it can fax in black and white, and the majority of the many front-panel controls are for this. Others are used to control copying and scanning, and the small but clear display was useful when printing photos and setting it up.

There are memory card slots and a USB socket for direct printing from memory cards or cameras. It can connect to a single computer over USB (cable not supplied) or to a wireless network for shared printing (it doesn't work with wired networks).

Scans looked good and didn't take long, and copies were a little on the light side but otherwise impressive. A colour A4 copy took 30 seconds and the same page in black and white 20 seconds.

There is no separate feeder for photo paper so you must remove the main stack and replace it with photo paper to print pictures.

Kodak's software is relatively unobtrusive but it does include basic scanning, photo-editing and printing tools. Photos came out fine, though a little muted, and an A4 colour print took a reasonable 150 seconds.

Business graphics – charts and graphs – looked very good, however, on both photo-paper and normal paper.