Kodak’s ESP-3 is one of the best-looking all-in-one machines in the Labs: the glossy black chassis curves elegantly and eschews the boring grey of many other machines this month.

Unfortunately, the Kodak is almost entirely a triumph of style over substance. In operation, the ESP-3 is awkward to use – the 2.4in LCD, implemented so well in the Canon Pixma MP610, isn’t clear about which options are available or what’s happening: there’s no scanning progress bar, for instance, just a message to confirm that scanning is actually taking place.

Other aspects of the ESP-3 seem odd, too: there’s no option to scan in either standard or draft settings – it’s best or nothing, which doesn’t bode well for speed or file sizes. It’s also noisy.

Print quality isn’t impressive either, with only standard documents and photos providing respectable results, though they pale in comparison to most other machines here. Draft documents and colour documents were even worse.

Scanning and copying didn’t fare any better, either. The ESP-3 provided the worst scanning results on test. Standard-quality copies were handled reasonably well, but colour copies and photographs, again, lacked sharpness
and accuracy.

The ESP-3 is reasonably cheap to run. Its combined colour tank ran out almost simultaneously with the black, so wastage isn’t an issue – and it worked out as cheap for photos as the better models here.

One positive aspect of the ESP-3 is its operating speed. Standard-quality documents were printed at 5.3ppm – quicker than five other machines on test – with colour documents being produced at a reasonable 2.6ppm.

While a 6 x 4in photo took almost three minutes to scan, documents and pictures at lower detail settings were far quicker: a 150ppi letter was produced in 15 seconds, which was only beaten by two other machines. Impressively, this figure only rose to 17 seconds when the Kodak was tasked with an A4 photo.

The speed, though, isn’t enough to mask the Kodak’s myriad faults. Quality is poor across the board, it’s awkward to use and it’s dear for what you get, which leaves us with little to recommend it.