Kodak EasyShare 5500 All-in-One Printer Print, Copy, Scan, and Fax (1600105)

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...Read more

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...Read more

I do minimum printing, and Kodak 5500 ink is disappearing at a very rapid rate. On my older HP printer, I could print for 6 months or more on one cartridge. While my printing has not increased, since I bought the AiO 5500 in July, 2007, I have been through 3 sets of black/color cartridges. I contacted Kodak with a problem when no black text would print from new ink cartridges, and yet both my black and color ink cartridges registered totally empty with NOTHING having been printed from them. I was sent a new print head, and that fixed the "nothing would print" issue, but what is the fix for the "phantom ink use" I continue to see? I have been in contact with Kodak, to no avail. Ink continues to deplete with little or nothing being printed on the 5500. I am using a cheap Dell 725 printer for all drafts, and using the 5500 only for finals, if I must. I believe that Kodak's advertising campaign is misleading the public. Cheap ink is not cheap if it has to be replaced 3 times as...Read more