Verdict

Pros

• Separate, powered photo tray
• Low running costs
• Touchscreen controls

Cons

• Reduced size of duplex page images
• Occasional paper misfeeds
• Poor colour match on copies

Kodak’s range of hero all-in-ones was one of the first to incorporate remote printing, via Google Cloud. There are four machines in the range, from the entry-level https://www.trustedreviews.com/kodak-hero-5-1_Printer_review hero 5.1
to the high-end https://www.trustedreviews.com/kodak-hero-9-1_Printer_review hero 9.1, with the https://www.trustedreviews.com/kodak-office-hero-6-1_Printer_review officehero 6.1 in between for SOHO customers. This machine sits where the numbers suggest, between 6.1 and 9.1.

The slightly flared black and silver case of the hero 7.1 makes it look very solid and smooth, with a Kodak red keyline under the lid of the flatbed scanner. Directly below the lid is a sheer control panel. Made up of an 89mm LCD touchscreen with dedicated touch buttons down either side, the only physical button is for power.

Below the control panel, projecting from the front, are twin paper trays. At the bottom is a 100-sheet A4 tray and above this is another for up to 20 sheets of photo paper of up to 13 x 18cm. This tray is powered, so when the machine is asked to print photos, it automatically rolls the tray into position. A two-stage, telescopic paper support pulls out from the front edge of the tray cover, to provide an output tray.

In between the control panel and paper trays, to the right, are sockets for SD card and MemoryStick and for USB drive and PictBridge camera. At the back are USB and 10/100 Ethernet sockets, but the wireless connection is probably favourite. WPS setup is very straightforward, involving only a couple of taps of the touchscreen.

This printer uses the same engine as in most of the earlier Kodak machines, with a single black cartridge and a second colour one with five colours, including photo black and a gloss enhancer.

Kodak rates the hero 7.1 slightly faster than the hero 5.1, even though they both use ostensibly the same print engine. Here, the claim is 8.5ppm for black pages and 5.5ppm for colour. We didn’t see either of these speeds under test, though the machine did manage 4.2ppm on our 5-page black text test, rising to 5.3ppm on the 20-page document. The five-page black text and colour graphics test gave 3.1ppm; none of these speeds is particularly impressive.

We also noticed some misfeeds from this particular unit, with printing starting two thirds of the way down the page and a kink in the paper above this, suggesting it didn’t feed smoothly through the printer. This happened on two separate print runs, but was by no means consistent and is probably just a problem with this particular sample.

What is a more general difficulty is the way the printer automatically reduces the size of duplex page images. The printed page is reduced by around 10 percent when printing double-sided and although we can understand the reason for this, because of the paper handling requirements of the duplexer, we feel it should be made clearer in the printer’s documentation. Our 20-page print, run as a duplex job, gave 3.3 sides per minute; better than most Canon printers, but not as good as recent Epsons.

The quality of prints from the machine is generally pretty good, with clean and well-formed text and a reasonable draft mode, though there is occasional mis-registration from one head pass to the next. Colour graphics are also bright and relatively smooth, though there’s some banding and a copy from the flatbed changed some colours noticeably. Pale blue went to a light mauve, for example.

Photo reproduction is good, with natural colours and better than average levels of detail, though some is lost in shadowed areas. Photo prints took from 35s to 49s for a 15 x 10cm image, which is very respectable and 32s for an A4 colour copy from the flatbed is also acceptable.

This machine is a lot quieter when printing than the hero 5.1, coming out at 63dBA, when the cheaper machine is a full 3dBA louder, at 66dBA.

Kodak’s cartridge prices have risen a bit recently, so it’s not quite the good deal it used to be, but at 2.0p for an ISO black page, based on the high-capacity XL black cartridge, and 4.2p for an ISO colour page, running costs are still among the best you’ll see.

Verdict
The Kodak hero 7.1 is a mix of good and not so good. It’s useful to have touchscreen control and a separate, powered tray for photo blanks. Duplex print is also worth having, though the reduction in page size is a continuing annoyance. In case you wonder about buying Kodak because of its US parent company’s filing for Chapter 11 protection, the UK arm has assured us this won’t affect its business over here, or the continuing supply of consumables.

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