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Manual 3.50
The Kodak ESP 3 does not come with an official manual, just a short start-up guide pamphlet, which was disappointing. While the printer is a simple printer with few on-unit options, it still would’ve been confident to have a hard-copy manual for instructions, software, connections and troubleshooting. Kodak appears to have a trend of not including a print version of manuals, as the Kodak EasyShare 5300 also did not come with one. But other manufacturers like HP and Canon do include manuals. In the Canon MX850 initial package, a 188-page hard copy manual was included.
Out of the Box 7.00
The Kodak ESP 3 comes with black and color ink, sample paper, a software CD, a quick start pamphlet, power supply, adapter cord and the printer itself. A USB cord is not included with the printer, which is needed to connect the printer to your PC.
Setup 4.00
Hooking up the printer was simple and required plugging it in and connecting to a PC with a USB cord, which again, was not supplied with the printer.
The Kodak ESP 3 gets a lower setup score because of its poor performance in software installation. Because a previous version of the Kodak EasyShare software was present on our tested PC, the ESP 3 software took not only a lot of time to install but provided a lot of run-arounds, which made the setup process very painful and tedious. The ESP 3 official website has troubleshooting options for this exact problem, which tells us this may happen more often than not. It took a nearly two hour chat session with Kodak live chat representative to fix the problem and even then, it wasn’t fully repaired. Although this may not be a problem for those new to Kodak or whose PCs are clear of Kodak software, it may happen for those upgrading from another Kodak printer, specifically in the EasyShare family.
Driver 8.00
The driver of the Kodak ESP 3 was visually more interactive than its competing Canon MX850 and HP Photosmart 5180, because it provided more and larger icons and they were clickable. This was really nice because it made the options provided in the driver more comprehendible.
The Printing Preferences window contains three tabs: General, Layout and Advanced. The General tab contains options for setting the quality, paper size, quantity and whether you want the print to be in portrait or landscape. The Layout tab provides options to set the size and scale of the printer, whether you want a booklet, poster layout or what the print to be 100% of the original or more or less. The Layout section also displays the ink levels. And the Advanced controls the options for whether you want use the color ink or just the black, the paper type, and whether you’d like the printer to place a watermark on your prints. The Advanced section also displays the ink levels for the printer.
Software 3.60
The main portal into the software is through the Kodak AiO Home Center which provides six clickable options: Scan Pictures and Documents, Copy Pictures, Print Pictures, Configure Settings, My Resource Center and Order Supplies. When the printer is off or not plugged in, the first four options will be grayed out and unclickable. When the printer is properly plugged in to a PC and powered on, those deactivated options will become active.
The scanning and copying options are described in the scan and copy sections later on, but basically are simple, minimal steps to copying and scanning. There are no editing features in the two; the closest thing to an image or document editing tool provided is the "color restored" scan or copy.
The Print Pictures section has a little more to work with, but again not much. The Print Pictures section allows you to browse your PC for pictures and organize their viewing by either the date taken or by name. You can either print via your PC or through a memory stick or other card slot provided on the printer unit itself. Once you’ve selected photographs, the editing options available are categorized as enhancements, adjustments, custom facial retouch and cropping.
The enhancements tab offers sharpening, color restoration, red eye reduction, facial retouch and Kodak Perfect Touch. The photograph below shows the effects of the Kodak Perfect Touch option when its selected.
If you compare the above image to the original up top, you'll see that the Kodak Perfect Touch feature actually made the image imperfect, making it appear dull and ghostly. All of the options within enhancements are automatic changes, which means the software makes the adjustments for you and you don’t have a say in how much impact they will have on your images. And as you can see from the example above, sometimes being able to have control is necessary. You get some freedom in the adjustments tab because it provides toggle adjustments in brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, midtones and highlights.
The good thing about this program is whatever changes you made in the previous tab gets carried over in the next. So you don’t have to go back to undo the changes. But it doesn’t carry over past the adjustments tab.
The custom facial retouch tab is probably the most interesting because it allows you to select a face in your image and apply the facial retouch feature. You can adjust it increments of default, low or medium. And the last option is cropping, which allows you to crop within a paper size like 4x6 inch or a free form crop, where you can decide the actual dimensions.
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