Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE October 22, 2012: Well after owning this printer for one year, the initial joy has faded, only to be replaced by frustration and misery. I am therefore reducing my rating to one star. Why? 1) The printer stopped working entirely at about the 6-month mark and had to be replaced under warranty 2) The printer regularly drops the WiFi connection and will not reconnect without powering it off and on. 3) The software wants to install updates at an annoying frequency, which makes me question the quality of the software in the first place. 4) The printer seems to go though increasing amounts of ink with age. I swear they program something into these printers to make them nearly unusable after the warranty is up. The most recent cartridge lasted only 80 pages or so, less than ONE FIFTH of the rated life. 5) The black print head is clogged and will no longer print. This is despite always using 100% genuine Kodak cartridges. In short, this printer turned out to be an even BIGGER disappointment than my last two ink jets. Good riddance Kodak, you deserve your bankruptcy. ==== Original review from August 2011 ===== No-fuss, low cost photos - I'm impressed. Our old cannon all-in one printer finally died and will no longer feed envelopes. Plus it guzzles ink like its going out of style. Time to buy a new printer. Yuck... Naturally this involves spending 2 hours at office max looking at all the overlapping variations of printers and getting useless help from store personnel: Employee #1: I hear Lexmark is pretty good, you should buy this one (points at random $300 printer) Employee #2, 30 minutes later: I really don't recommend Lexmark, Epson is the way to go (gestures in the general direction of the Epson aisle). So I resort to using my iPhone and trying to read multi-page printer reviews on the 3" screen. At it turns out, both the Lexmark and Epson I am looking at get stinky reviews, so I decide to go with a Brother for $59. If I can't have good, might as well go for cheap. I'm on my way to the register, cart loaded with ink, printer and paper, when I pass a display for Kodak printers. What catches my eye is the "lowest per-page ink cost in the industry" signage. Indeed, genuine cartridges are only $10, rather than $40 for the Brother. Suddenly it occurs to me that this Brother printer isn't going to be very cheap in the long run. Now I'm intrigued, so the iPhone comes out again. A 3rd employee hovers at a safe distance, probably trying to work up the courage to talk to this clearly frazzled customer. Of course the Kodak is a new model, so all I can find out is that it has a patented pigment-based ink that is supposed to last 100 years and the reviewer thinks the printer prints "above average" photos (whatever that means). Now my daughter is starting to fuss and my feet are tired so I dump the Brother back on the shelf and grab the $150 Kodak. If nothing else, I can be confident my smudged and off-color home photo prints will be inexpensive to throw away. So I take it and home and.... 1) Turn on. 2) Install software. 3) Print photo. I left all the settings on auto, used my old photo paper from Costco and just let it rip. I figure I might as well get a baseline and find out how much time and ink I am going to waste getting all the colors and settings dialed in. When the photo came out I almost fell over. It looked beautiful, nearly identical to the exact same photo we had paid to have professionally developed a week earlier. And I didn't have to adjust a dang thing. Revolutionary I tell you. Now if you were to hold them up close in your hand you can definitely tell the inkjet because it has that faint grainy "inkjet" texture to the lighter tones, so it's not perfect. But for a little $150 box that also sends faxes and scans things I was quite amazed. Kudos to Kodak for making my life a little easier, and for leading the way in lowering the cost of printing.