Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A very big dissapointment and a waster of time, December 1, 2007
I WAS in the market for a replacement for my aging Lexmark X6100 All-In-One so I was very up beat when I found out that Kodak has come up with "cheap ink" AiO printer line.
I got the 5500 at Best Buy for what I though was a decent price of $199.
I set it up, printed a demo page, calibrated the printer and printed a diagnostic page. Printer was pretty slow and noisy but worked fine so far. Then I sent to it a 4x6 photograph and got the familiar and popular error saying that "the print head is missing or needs to be replaced". After reinstalling the print head over and over as suggested by the diagnostic message, I gave up after loosing 4 hrs of my life. Next day, I called the Customer Support at Kodak. The person with a very high level of certainty diagnosed my issue as a 'faulty print head' - seemingly a very popular cause with this printer. The print head was to arrive overnight - It arrived 3 days later. Replacing the head did not help. So, I went to the Kodak website and learned that there is a new firmware for this printer. After uploading the new firmware to the printer it went dumb. It was spitting out two sheets and then wrinkling up and spitting out more pages. No way to stop it except pulling the plug. So, I did. Next day, convinced that it must be an isolated issue, I went to Best Buy to replace the printer. I went through the exact same initial steps again and even got further this time. I was able to print 8 4x6 color photos in the "Best" mode, which looked pretty good as far as color saturation, but were a bit skewed. They also used up close to 50% of my color ink cartridge! So, I estimate that I can get probably only about 20-25 such prints out of a full color ink cartridge, which is much much less than the advertised 35. Then I tried the double sided print from a network computer and found out that the duplex option is disabled on every computer except the one to which the printer is physically connected. This is of course not advertised anywhere. So, I decided to test the double sided printing on the host. It was sloooooooooooow and not printing out a large part of the top of the page. So, I said to my self - Ok, there must surely be a good reason for the new firmware to be offered on Kodak's website. So, I uploaded it again and...the printer went dumb again...
I actually read the reviews on Amazon and still decided to give this printer a try "because it looked sooo nice and offered sooo much". I said to myself, what the heck - I am a pretty savvy techie - I can certainly do better than these "Amazon amateurs". Well, now I am joining what actually turned out to be a pretty wise Amazon crowd with my tail and ears curled all the way down in my disappointment.
Next day, I returned the second printer and am sticking to my old Lexmark for time being.
Kodak 5500 and especially its software and firmware are of poor quality. Endless errors, less than ideal prints, DON'T BUY. Consider yourself warned.
And...please read more interesting reviews of its sibling - the 5300 series.
One more thing - "friendly Kodak guy". Please spare me your comment...
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing, October 23, 2007
The idea of faxing is pretty archaic these days. If I need to fax, I send it directly from my computer. To diss this amazing printer because of its faxing flaw is ridiculous. As a photographer/graphic artist/writer, this printer is a dream. I love it. And thank god for the cheap printer cartridges.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
very unstable software!, April 13, 2008
This machine seems to work fine if you don't connect it to the computer. I can print my photos from the memory card, fax, and copy. Once you connect it to the computer, awful things happens..
- the printer driver is very unstable and the firmware is buggy. The installation hung on me once, and crashed another time.
- although I can scan fine, attempting to print always results in "the printer not responding" -- this always happens immediately or halfway through the printing process.
- there is NO hard power switch. The power switch is a soft-switch which means if the printer software crashes, you can't turn the printer off unless you pull the power cord from the back. I had this happen 2-3 times.
- When the printer firmware becomes unstable, the clean way of resetting is to 1) unplug the usb cable 2) pull the power cord from the printer 3) reboot the computer 3) insert the power cord back 4) wait until the printer fully boots 5) reinsert the usb cable.
- The printer driver software is a whopping 200MB and installs NET 2.0 framework on the PC. This would've been fine if the software wasn't so riddled with problems.
- sometimes the photo tray light remains on even when the tray is pulled back. When this happens, it means the printer is messed up and you need to pull the power cord and reinsert.
- when you choose "copy," it scans from the flatbed scanner, not from the document feeder (as when you're sending fax), which means you can only copy one paper at a time.
While I never had any intention of printing documents with this printer (I have a separate laser printer for that), the fact that I can't print photos larger than 4x6 (since the printing feature is broken) is disappointing.
If you think of this as a big scanner, paper copier, fax machine, and 4x6 photo printer-- it works OK. If you're trying to use this as a stable dual-sided computer printer, you'll be sorely disappointed !
I haven't had problems with the "print head" (yet) as with other reviewers.
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