If you are a home office user in need to an AIO unit as well as on a tight budget, you may wish to consider Kodak’s recently released Office Hero 6.1. It is a fully-featured unit with the ability to print, scan, copy, and fax. It can print black pages at up to 8.5 ISO ppm and color at 5.5 ISO ppm.
The printer comes with 2.4” LCD touchsreen display which allows users to preview photos before you print them. Because it is supposed to be an office-centric printer, it also features Ethernet connectivity in addition to Wi-Fi and USB 2.0. As with many of Kodak’s new units, it also features the ability to print from your devices like tablets or smart phones (or computers) using Google Cloud Print. Kodak has developed their own version of printing via email. Simply email the unique, assigned email address of your printer, and your output is sent through. Users can also print photos from iOS, Android, or Blackberry devices with Kodak’s Pic Flick app. We’re not sure how often office folks would need the photo printing capability, so that may be an extra perk.
The paper tray is a pretty decent size for an office. It can hold up to 200 sheets of paper at once, or up to 70 sheets of photo paper. However, as we said above, we’re not sure how many offices would need to keep a printer stocked with photo paper so this may relegate the Hero 6.1 to home office use. In addition to automatic two-sided printing, it also has the ability to do two-sided copying, scanning, and faxing with its 35-page capacity ADF.
The ink system is generally our largest area of concern with Kodak printers. It becomes more of an issue with an office printer, even if it would be used for light home office duty. For one thing, the page yields are relatively small. There is a single black cartridge which is available in either standard yield (425 pages) or high yield (770 pages). The color cartridge is a tri-color (cyan, magenta, and yellow) with a standard yield (420 pages). The cost per page difference between the two black options only ends up being 0.2 cents (2.4 cents/page vs. 2.2 cents/page) which means it’s almost a wash. There is also no high-yield option for color. One could argue that there is not a large need for color in business applications, but if you’re mainly printing black and white, then you may wish to consider a small laser printer.
For comparison’s sake, let’s look at the Hero 6.1 and HP’s new Officejet 8600 for instance. Both have a base MSRP of $199.99 and are currently on sale for $149.99. Kodak does offer automatic two-sided everything compared to the HP model’s automatic two-sided printing only. They both have a 35-page ADF, but HP’s paper tray is slightly larger with a 250-sheet capacity (compared to 200), and it can hold up to 100 sheets of photo paper (compared to 70). Also, the HP printer is more than twice as fast in terms of ISO print speed (18 and 13 compared to 8.5 and 5.5). HP also offers standard ink cartridges and high-yield ink cartridges which cost more initially, but better cost per page overall.
