Kodak Hero 9.1 All-in-One Printer Review: Slow but Capable Home MFP
The $250 (as of December 7, 2011) Kodak Hero 9.1 color inkjet multifunction printer is $50 more costly than the Office Hero 6.1, but this more home-oriented MFP did not fare as well in our hands-on evaluations. Our test unit produced the same excellent pics as the Office Hero did; this model also uses the same affordable inks, and it adds an easy-to-use and attractive 4.3-inch color touchscreen to the mix. Unfortunately, it also suffered from some construction quirks that its cousin did not.
In our tests, issue number one was that we could not lift the scanner unit to change the ink cartridges and access the upper paper path. The latch was stuck. After we made several attempts involving some extra force, it worked fine. We’ve never had to wear down a part like this to get it to work right. And even though the Hero 9.1 survived our speed testing without a hitch, it jammed twice within an hour or so of hands-on use. Nearly all printed pages had a tiny dimple or bite in the same location along the lead edge of the sheet. While a printer’s paper mechanism may leave a very small nick where it grabs the edge, obviously a jam is an undesirable outcome. Kodak is sending us a replacement unit to double-check.
Otherwise the Hero 9.1 performed as advertised. Photos looked great, featuring by far the most realistic color spectrum in the business. Text was sharp and dark, if not perfectly black. Regular graphics printed on plain paper were acceptable (though a tiny dull and grainy). Color duplicates of heavily covered pages showed a subtle but noticeable vertical banding, unlike the horizontal banding we are more accustomed to seeing.
The Hero 9.1 is fast enough for a home office or dorm room, but not for most businesses. Text pages emerged from our test unit at a sedate 5.1 pages per minute on the PC and 3.8 ppm on the Mac. Half-page pics printed at 2.2 ppm on plain paper, and 1.2 ppm on Kodak’s glossy pic paper. A full-page pic prints in approximately two and a half minutes, though as noted it’s worth the wait. Our scans were not particularly quick either.
The installation procedure for the Hero 9.1 is best-in-class. The set-up software is attractive and painless to use, and the Home Center software is comprehensive as well as extremely easy to work with. You get OCR (optical character recognition) functions as well as 3D pic printing (Kodak even includes 3D glasses for you to enjoy the results), plus the usual photo-printing and scanning modules. Kodak also offers many ways to use this printer with a mobile device, via Google Cloud Print or its own email printing service, as well as through mobile-device apps for printing wirelessly.
Much as we enjoy the Home Center software, we came across a few kinks during use this time. When we tested the Hero 9.1 on our Mac platform using Microsoft Word, the system hung after we selected the ‘Printer Options 2′ menu option in the print driver. Kodak is aware of this issue, and will be releasing a fix with the 7.3 version of its Home Center software later this month.
The Home Center scan driver includes Kodak’s Perfect Page, an imaging technology designed to improve the quality of scanned documents with less user intervention. It is enabled by default in the driver. Unfortunately, in our routine test of scanning a easy document with plain black text, the results were decidedly imperfect, showing significant areas of white artifacts, especially within bigger font sizes. Kodak confirmed that if the user tells the driver to scan a document in black-and-white, leaving Perfect Page enabled creates this result. Disabling Perfect Page eliminates the issue.
Ink for the Hero 9.1 has the same outstandingly low cost per page as that of the Office Hero 6.1. The standard-size, 425-page black cartridge costs $10, for a per-page cost of only 2.35 cents. The three-color unified cartridge costs $20 and lasts for 420 pages, or 4.75 cents per page. A four-color page for only 7.1 cents is literally half the cost of what you’d pay with many MFPs in this class. The $17, 770-page XL black cartridge cuts costs only slightly, to 2.2 cents per page, but it does save on trips to the store for refills.
The Kodak Hero 9.1 has a lot going for it, but its slowness, as well as the physical flaws we encountered, prevent a wholehearted recommendation. Many people may prefer the cheaper Office Hero 6.1, or alternatives such as the Epson Artisan 837 or the HP Photosmart 7510.
source : news.idg.no
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Submited at Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 4:00 pm on Uncategorized by hilman
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