Kodak ESP 7250 review

The ESP 7250 is near the top end of the price range for home MFPs, but Kodak clearly hopes to make up for this with the printer’s low ink costs of just 4.3p per mixed-colour page. This is phenomenally cheap, giving MFP print costs similar to business inkjets like HP’s Officejet 6000.

The ESP 7250 also has plenty of features to help justify its price, with an automatic duplexer, a 2.4in colour screen, a dedicated tray for smaller photographic paper, a memory card reader, PictBridge USB port, as well as 802.11n wireless and a wired 10/100 Ethernet port to go with the standard USB port. iPhone and Blackberry users can even download apps allowing them to print directly from their phones.

Kodak has opted to use a single colour cartridge, with pigmented photographic black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks, plus a clear coating designed to reduce the bronzing and improve the permanence and water-resistance of your photos. Combined-colour cartridges can have hidden costs as it’s almost inevitable that you will use more of one colour than the others. Cyan is often the first to go, particularly if you’re printing the snaps from a seaside holiday. However, at £12 for a 420 page colour cartridge, this still won’t be a major worry. A 770 page black cartridge costs a little over £11, but the printer comes with a 425 page black cartridge and an introductory colour cartridge of undisclosed capacity.

The ESP 7250 is certainly cheap to run, but it still has to compete with the astonishing print quality of Canon’s Pixma MP640. It’s here that the Kodak printer’s failings become apparent. Standard quality mono text looks clear and sharp, but printed at a slow 4.1ppm. Draft text was much quicker at 13.8ppm, but the letters had jagged edges and some lines of text were broken in the middle.

Our illustrated business documents were a mixed bag. Text was sharp, but normally rich areas of solid red and blue colour looked pale and insipid, while dark shaded areas looked black, rather than gradated. Light shading was perfectly smooth, though. Photo quality is good enough for snapshots, but the print head left marks even at best quality and after a re-alignment. Photos looked rather gritty, with visible dithering on areas of shading, while low-contrast images looked dull. We also found it hard to correctly align our 6x4in prints in the dedicated paper tray, which meant that many of them had fine white borders.

The integrated CIS scanner produced quick and reasonably accurate scans but we noticed occasional colour reproduction imperfections and odd pixels that were simply the wrong colour entirely. Copy quality was much worse. Mono copies had visible print head marks but were otherwise fine. Colour copies, however, were patchy, murky and slightly fuzzy.

Although it’s cheaper to run, the ESP 7250 can’t compete with the speed, quality and price of our Best Buy, Canon’s Pixma MP640.