The Kodak Easyshare 5500 a Jack of All Trades

This printer was a Christmas gift and a replacement for an HP 722 DeskJet with ink cartridges that are quickly becoming obsolete and very hard to find.

I had a heck of a time getting my Athelon based E-Machine to work with this printer. A Macbook and another WinXP notebook worked flawlessly on the first attempts. After escalating my tech support issue to "Level 2" by Kodak standards, my problem was immediately solved! The solution? A powered USB hub! Even though it's not mentioned anywhere during the initial setup, or by the first two tech support guys, a powered USB hub solves USB recognition errors!

A frustrating moment...Got that off my chest...Whew!

Now that this printer is working, it works rather well for a $149, (at Best Buy), AIO printer. If you use medium or good quality regular multipurpose paper to print on it can produce very nice color graphics and pictures for every day use and kids projects. If you use really cheap paper, you get washed out colors and grainy graphics. The Kodak Photo five star paper, (and also tested some Epson and HP glossy photo papers), produces excellent photo results.

The user interface is VERY simplistic and as such has very little adjustment options. On the other hand, it's hard to make a mistake or get lost with such a simple interface.... a good thing. Kinda like a Bang % Olufsen approach to an AIO printer. My six year old daughter can easily scan pictures and make copies. Not an easy thing to say about most AIO units.

We have tested the heck out of this thing and I have almost printed a ream of paper in two days trying to purposely create a failure. Surprisingly, after reading the other reviews, so far we have had no paper jams or problems!

While this machine is not the most quiet unit I have ever owned, it works well, and goes into a nice home-office sleeping standby mode in as little as three minutes. I like the two-sided printing option, and the document feeder for fax and scanning. When this thing is working it sounds like a tiny muffled factory of gears, motors, and electronic chatter. It's not too loud to become a nuisance, just an observable flurry of activity from an otherwise quiet appliance.

Only time will tell if this is truly a cost saver. However, I did like paying $22 for a set of new Color and Black cartridges, instead of over $70 for my old HP722 DeskJet, with #23 and #45 cartridges.