Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Printer Review

Features
Handling
Performance
Verdict
Specification


Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Front

The Kodak Hero printer series promises "The lowest ink replacement costs in the UK" - and with the Hero 7.1 they also aim to provide high quality prints with 5 colour inks, including a gloss ink to maintain a glossy finish to photos.


Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Back with Ethernet, USB, power and duplexing unit.

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Features

The Kodak range of printers use a set of inks that are designed to be the cheapest in the industry and should give hundreds of prints from the standard cartridges. The front of the printer has a 3.5inch touch screen on a tiltable control panel.


Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Inks

Standard cartridges:
Kodak 10B Black Ink Cartridge - Prints 425 black text pages
Kodak 10CL Colour Ink Cartridge - Prints 420 colour graphic documents

High-volume XL cartridges:
Kodak 10XL Black Ink Cartridge - Prints 770 black text pages

Key Features

• 3.5inch touch screen,
• 200 sheet paper tray, 40 sheet tray for photo paper,
• Wifi, ethernet, USB connections
• Automatic Double sided printing
• Barcoded Kodak paper - printer sets settings automaticallys
• Print 3D Photos - view with included 3D glasses
• Prints dry instantly - and last a "lifetime"
• Print individual frames from video
• Scanner: 150-9600dpi
• Print on the go from your smartphone, computer, or tablet using Google Cloud Print enabled apps
• Send emails and attachments to your printer from anywhere, using any email capable, web connected device with KODAK Email Print Service
• Print photos directly from your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, BLACKBERRY, or ANDROID device with the KODAK Pic Flick App

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Handling

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Touch Screen	Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Card / USB

Setup only took around 3-4 minutes after installing cartridges for the printer, with the print out of the calibration page, then wireless setup took 2-3 minutes. While selecting the wireless network, the printer showed the signal strength of each wireless network in range. After this the printer advised me to install the software CD onto my PC.

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One	Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Inks

During install you select the printer you have, then it downloads a 13mb updater program, then when the install starts it downloads another 13mb download, then it downloads an all in one home center program that is 40mb. All the while displaying the remaining time as 1 minute left!

After the install is complete, you select how you are connecting: USB, Wireless or Ethernet, then the printer drivers are installed. This took a total of around 8 minutes. At the end of the install it asks if you want to update the firmware of the printer, if one is available. The printer was showing firmware 2.5 and the updated version 2.7 so I decided to go ahead - this took around 3-4 minutes.

After this we were ready to print, scan and copy! The next day the software told me a new update was available and downloaded it all over again!

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Performance

Scanning: The scanner is quite loud. Scans can be saved as PDF (searchable) or RTF (editable) as well as the usual JPG, BMP, TIFF and PNG image formats. Scanning to PDF or RTF was surprisingly quick and when scanning printed material worked very well.

Scanning can be performed from the touchscreen and scanned to: computer, memory card, usb flash drive, email or network folder. This produces a quick scan of around 2mb for an A4 photo - the scan shows lots of noise particularly in the darker areas. The scan options can be changed in the Home Center settings up to 600dpi, with quality options of low, standard, high and maximum.


Scanning setup

Using the Kodak Home Center to scan, a full A4 scan at 600dpi takes around 3 minutes. Again the scan shows a lot of noise, added to the photo by the scanner, all over the image, plus some banding. Scanning at 1200dpi the program warned me that the Home Center may not be able to open it, then warned that there wasn't enough memory to process the image, so it would disable image processing - this seems strange, why have resolutions not fully supported by the scanner or software? Then when I was using Wi-Fi it crashed, although retrying using a USB cable was fine scanning at 1200 and 2400dpi (the scanners maximum optical resolution).


Home center

Printing: Using the Kodak Home Center to print photos, there were numerous options to retouch the photos or adjust them, but there didn't seem to be any actual settings to choose regarding the print quality, or to select a black and white print. When printing the printer scans the paper prior to actually printing to determine the best settings and in our testing the printer did a good job regardless of what paper we put in.


Full A4 photo prints take around 2 minutes, on standard settings. Leaving all the settings on default and not altering the photo print in any way, the prints appeared a little flat, slightly washed out and lacking saturation.

Using the built in Windows photo viewer to print the images, it's possible to get to the full (standard) printer settings and here I was able to select high quality, colour or black and white, borderless etc. The prints from Windows were much more colourful and quality appeared better than using the Home Center.

Ink levels displayed on the printer screen were occassionally different to what is shown on the status screen on the PC. I'm not entirely sure which one should be trusted but the printer kept on printing even when showing low ink levels.

Google cloud printing: Setup lets you print from Google cloud compatible programs and devices, such as the Google Chrome browser, etc, but it doesn't let you add a printer to your PC as you would expect, but is available to add to a Mac. There's also a Kodak email address that you can email from any device such as a mobile phone or laptop. Setting these up also gives you access to the online management of the printer using where you can quickly check advanced settings. Printing to the Kodak email address is quicker than I expected, printing straight to the printer in less than a minute. Printing using the Google cloud service took a little longer, but worked just as expected.

Kodak Home Center lets you print your photos from Kodak Gallery, Facebook (although beware of low quality uploads!), Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa, letting you browse them as though they were stored locally on your PC.

Nb. In order to show the photo print quality, we've used another scanner, as the Kodak scanner images show higher levels of contrast and slightly washed out images compared to the actual prints, as well as additional noise. The black and white print printed with a slight sepia cast as shown in the Kodak scan.

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Sample Photos

Value For Money

For the price, at around £155, the Kodak Hero 7.1 compares fairly well with similar printers from other manufacturers, albeit with much less expensive ink replacements with the Kodak. Alternatives to look at include the Epson Stylus Photo PX830FWD, featuring CD/DVD printing and the Canon Pixma MG8250 featuring high quality negative film scanning. The MG6250 is a cheaper option at around £140.

Ink costs: Genuine Kodak Ink for the Hero 7.1 costs £12.99 for colour and £6.99 for black, a total of £19.98. Genuine Epson ink for the PX830FWD costs £58 for all 6 cartridges. Genuine Canon ink for the MG8250 costs £62 for all 6 cartridges. The savings made will depend on how often you need to replace the cartridges and how much you print.

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Verdict

The Kodak Hero 7.1 produces good colour prints and reasonable black and white prints, particularly when you go into the printer settings and set it to maximum quality. The scanner is a little poor being quite noisy both audibly and in the noise it puts onto images scanned using it.

Connectivity and setup is very good, with a lot of options including ethernet, which is unexpected on a mid-range home printer. Being about to use email and Google Cloud printing makes the printer even easier to use.

Price wise the printer may seem a little more expensive than some alternatives however, the Hero 7.1 offers a lot of connectivity, USB, Ethernet and wireless, as well as email and Google Cloud printing. Where the Hero also saves you money, especially if you print a lot, is in the cheap ink replacement cartridges. Overall, while scanning quality could be better, the printer has good photo quality and low ink costs with great connectivity.

	The Kodak Hero 7.1 has good photo quality, low ink costs and great connectivity.

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Pros

Wireless, USB, Ethernet Connections
Separate paper and photo trays
Big savings on ink costs
Good photo quality
Kodak email and Google Cloud printing
Scans quickly to PDF / RTF

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Cons

Quite loud when switching on and off
Scanner adds noise to scans
Minimum sleep time 1 hour
Paper sizes are shown in cm, not inches

FEATURES
HANDLING
PERFORMANCE
VALUE FOR MONEY
VERDICT

Kodak Hero 7.1 All-In-One Specifications

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