This is the EasyShare 5300 all-in-one's bigger sibling, intended for small and home office (SOHO) use. It has two advantages over the simpler machine, which account for it costing nearly twice as much. It comes with a 35-sheet Auto Document Feeder (ADF) and a clip-on duplexer, which turns the paper over so you can print on both sides of the paper in one task.
Both machines share a common ancestry, with the same print and scanning engines, paper trays and similar control panels. Slightly surprisingly, the colour LCD display on the EasyShare 5500 is smaller than on the lower-priced machine, but for a device aimed at businesses, this is probably reasonable. The accompanying control panel is easy to use, with illuminated function keys and a square of navigation buttons.
The device can take A4 plain paper and 15 x 10cm photo blanks, with the photo paper held in a sliding tray that's pushed into the front of the machine when you want to switch media. There are two memory card slots, which between them take all the common types, and a pair of USB sockets for connecting PictBridge cameras or optional WiFi or Bluetooth adapters.
The ADF makes scanning of multiple pages much more straightforward, but the usefulness of the duplexer is marred by the length of time it takes to produce double-sided pages. A single-sided, five-page text document takes just under one and a quarter minutes to print - around four pages per minute - while a 20-side, duplex document takes over six and a half minutes - just three sides per minute.
Another oddity of duplex print on the EasyShare 5500 is the loss of some of the page headers. It appears duplex pages have a bigger unprintable margin at the top of a page than single-sided ones. This would be reasonable, if it were mentioned in the documentation or flagged in the printer driver.
Print quality is good, with photo prints being particularly vibrant and clear, though colour on plain paper looks a bit insipid. Colour copies are more accurate than from some of the machine's rivals, though.
The headline running cost figure of 7p per print, which Kodak makes much of, is achievable if you buy the Photo Value Pack, which uses a thin but still serviceable photo paper. A simple black text page on plain paper will cost you just under 3p, which is at the high-end for an all-in-one at this price.
