Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer Review

Features & Specifications

Kodak’s middle of the road printer is what we are having a look at today. The Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer copies, scans, and prints just as you would expect an all-in-one to do. The biggest feature of the 5300 is the ink prices. Kodak moved the print head from the cartridge into the printer which allowed them to make inks much less expensive. You can get the black ink cartridge for $9.99 and the color ink cartridge costs $14.99. A kit with both cartridges is $22.99. The Epson RX700 I bought a year or so back takes six separate ink cartridges with each color cartridge costing $12.99 and the black cartridge costs $17.09. It cost me $64.95 for the color cartridges alone, when I could find them.

The print quality of the Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer is every bit as good as any photo printer I have used. Photographs have vivid colors, prints are smudge-proof and skin tones are realistic. You can’t tell the difference between prints form the Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer and ones I developed professionally. The printer can put out black document pages at 32 ppm and Kodak quotes print time for a 4x6 borderless print at 28 seconds on fastest print speeds.
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The scanner is great for scanning documents and allows you to scan to application or to a memory card. The paper tray holds 100 sheets of standard paper with a sliding tray for photos that can hold 20 4x6 sheets. In addition to 4x6 prints, you can print up to 8x10 shots as well using the main paper tray. Business users will like the optional duplexer that allows automatic double sided printing. An optional Bluetooth attachment is also available for wireless printing.

The copy function allows you to scale the output from 20% to 500% of the originals size. Copying sheets is fast and the printed output is sharp and legible. A memory card reader on the front panel accepts SD, XD, Memory Stick and CF cards. The Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer has a 3” LCD display that allows you to see images on a memory card and print them without needing a computer. A USB port on the front panel allows printing from PictBridge enabled cameras and USB drives as well. You can perform very limited editing function on the printers LCD screen which amount to zooming and rotating images.

Using the Kodak 5300 All-in-One

In use I printed a 4 x 6 borderless print of my daughter on best photo quality setting and it took 38 seconds on Kodak Premium Photo Glossy paper. Kodak’s print speeds are quoted in the fastest print speeds, so you expect best quality to take longer. The photo looked fantastic and was dry and ready to be handled as soon as it left the printer.

Printing paper documents on best print setting in black with a few blue highlights took 27 seconds. Printed output was sharp and very legible. I also scanned a few documents to memory card. The scanned output was exceptional with crisp letters and no distortion or noise in the documents. The only real problem I had with the Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer was that using the limited editing functions was a bit difficult. I could zoom in on a photo easily. However, when I decided I liked the original photo better, I could not get the printer to zoom back out so I could print the entire photo without removing the memory card and starting over.

Overall, the Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer is a great printer. It uses cheap inks that still have every bit of the quality of much more expensive print systems. You will pay more to get the Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-in-One Printer than you will for competitor’s products, the 5300 sells for $199. The first time you have to buy ink though, the extra cost upfront will be a distant memory.