I have been honored to test out two printers for the past 6 weeks or so. I have compared prints, both photos and text, color and black and white. I have scanned photos, yearbooks, and documents. I have also taken photos and scratched them and drowned them in water. Hey…its called testing!! Before this began I honestly thought that Kodak would be the winner because the ink was so cheap. In the long run it didn’t win because the ink ran out first AND the prints were not near as good as HP. In every single test I did, the quality of the prints were better with the HP printer. Kodak only gets two praises, the duplexer because I can print 2 sided without touching the paper, and the scanner because its bigger and separates multiple photos for me.
The biggest let down was the speed. Wired or not, the Kodak was SLOW. It was much slower over the wi-fi network that we have. The HP was slower too but again we have like 5 computers on this network so it was bound to lag a little. Also I never could get the HP scanner to send scans to computer, I always had to use my thumb drive to save them. I can’t complain though the method was very fast!
I had to change the inks in the HP printer after 4 weeks of daily prints. I always printed at least 10 photos and usually, because of school or my daughter BEGGING for coloring pages, 20 pages of text/graphics. I would do half of them on the HP and the other half on the Kodak. I am just mad about the slow speed of the Kodak.
When it comes down to it, the ink isn’t cheaper, and won’t save me money with Kodak because it ran out after 2 weeks. The HP has a dedicated photo black cartridge to help spare black ink and I think it helps a lot. I did all of my tests, every one of them, with default settings on both printers.
There was a clear winner in this test, based on performance and costs, and it was HP. Speed, print quality, longevity of inks. I print so much for school (and now photography class!) and I need reliability. I have found it in HP.
