The $250 (as of December 7, 2011) Kodak Hero nine.1 coloration inkjet multifunction printer is $50 more costly compared to the Office Hero 6.one, but this far more home-oriented MFP did not fare also within our hands-on evaluations. Our exam device produced exactly the same superb photographs because the Place of work Hero did; this model also makes use of the identical cheap inks, and it adds an easy-to-use and appealing four.3-inch color touchscreen to your mix. Regrettably, furthermore, it endured from some building quirks that its cousin didn't.
In our tests, problem number 1 was that we couldn't raise the scanner unit to change the ink cartridges and entry the upper paper path. The latch was stuck. After we produced several makes an attempt involving some added pressure, it worked fine. We?¡¥ve by no means had to dress in down an element like this to obtain it to function right. And though the Hero nine.one survived our speed testing with no hitch, it jammed two times inside an hour or so of hands-on use. Virtually all printed pages had a very small dimple or bite within the very same place alongside the direct edge of the sheet. Even though a printer's paper mechanism could depart an extremely tiny nick wherever it grabs the edge, obviously a jam is an undesirable final result. Kodak is sending us a replacement unit to double-check.
In any other case the Hero nine.1 performed as advertised. Photographs looked fantastic, featuring certainly one of the most sensible color spectrum while in the enterprise. Text was sharp and darkish, if not correctly black. Typical graphics printed on basic paper had been acceptable (however a bit uninteresting and grainy). Color copies of seriously coated pages confirmed a refined but visible vertical banding, as opposed to the horizontal banding we are more accustomed to viewing.
The Hero nine.1 is quickly ample for the house business office or dorm place, although not for some businesses. Text pages emerged from our test device at a sedate five.one pages per minute on the Computer and three.8 ppm on the Mac. Half-page images printed at two.two ppm on plain paper, and 1.two ppm on Kodak's shiny picture paper. A full-page image prints in about two plus a 50 percent minutes, even though as mentioned it can be definitely worth the wait around. Our scans were not especially quick both.
The set up procedure for the Hero 9.1 is best-in-class. The set up software package is appealing and painless to utilize, and also the House Center software program is thorough in addition to very straightforward to operate with. You get OCR (optical character recognition) functions together with 3D photo printing (Kodak even consists of 3D glasses to suit your needs to enjoy the outcomes), plus the usual photo-printing and scanning modules. Kodak also delivers a lot of solutions to use this printer with a cellular device, through Google Cloud Print or its personal e-mail printing support, together with by means of mobile-device applications for printing wirelessly.
A lot as we enjoy the Home Middle software, we encountered a few kinks in the course of use this time. Once we examined the Hero 9.1 on our Mac platform employing Microsoft Phrase, the program hung soon after we selected the 'Printer Alternatives 2' menu solution within the print driver. Kodak is informed of this issue, and can be releasing a repair with all the 7.three model of its Residence Center computer software later on this month.
The home Center scan driver incorporates Kodak's Excellent Web page, an imaging engineering designed to improve the high quality of scanned paperwork with less person intervention. It can be enabled by default within the driver. However, within our regimen test of scanning a basic document with plain black text, the results ended up decidedly imperfect, displaying considerable areas of white colored artifacts, specifically within bigger font measurements. Kodak confirmed that if the person tells the driver to scan a document in black-and-white, leaving Excellent Page enabled creates this end result. Disabling Perfect Page gets rid of the difficulty.
The Hero 9.1 connects by way of USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi, and gives SD Card, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, and USB/PictBridge ports for simple image printing or offloading of scans. The bottom-mounted paper tray holds 100 sheets and has an built-in 40-sheet image tray--the major variation, besides physical appearance, between the Hero 9.one and also the Office Hero six.one. The output tray retains around 50 sheets, and the computerized document feeder to the letter/A4-size scanner retains 30 sheets. Duplexing is entirely supported throughout the device, with two-sided printing together with two-sided-to-two-sided copying and scanning available.
Ink for that Hero nine.one has the exact same outstandingly cheap for each page as that with the Office Hero 6.1. The standard-size, 425-page black cartridge charges $10, for a per-page price tag of only two.35 cents. The three-color unified cartridge costs $20 and lasts for 420 pages, or 4.seventy five cents for each web page. A four-color web page for only seven.one cents is virtually fifty percent the fee of what you'd pay with many MFPs in this course. The $17, 770-page XL black cartridge cuts charges only slightly, to two.two cents per page, but it does preserve on trips to your shop for refills.
The Kodak Hero nine.1 incorporates a lot likely for it, but its slowness, in addition to the bodily flaws we encountered, avert a wholehearted suggestion. Many individuals may prefer the less expensive Business office Hero 6.1, or alternatives these because the Epson Artisan 837 or the HP Photosmart 7510.
