In the All-in-one printer market there's always a trade-off between cost and quality, and Kodak has made it clear that as a late comer to this area its principal focus is on keeping costs down, and therefore appealing directly to home users and small business operators.

Styled in chic black plastic with a curved front, the ESP 3 arrives in a lightweight (5.9kg) body that will occupy a compact space (42.2 x 29.8 x 17.3cm) on your work surface. The scanner lid is removable should you need to scan books or thicker materials and there's a single input/output tray at the front which will hold a maximum of 100 sheets of plain paper and up to 30 sheets of 10mil photo paper.

As you'd expect, A4 is the largest size you can scan or copy and there's an auto paper type detection system which will read what size paper you're printing off, but only if you're using Kodak photo papers. Any third party materials have to be set up via the supplied software which in this case is Kodak AiO Home Centre.

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This is one of the main grumbles about this machine. Initially your heart lifts when you see the presence of two media card slots (supporting CF, MS, xD and SD formats) plus a USB port for flash drives and Bluetooth adaptors. Then you realise there's no LCD monitor so you'll have to go back to the PC in order to view your camera images before printing. The only slight concession to PC-less operation is a quantity button (which only goes up to 9) and two additional buttons for Black/Colour and 100 percent/Fit To Page.

Home Centre as a package seems quite impressive but we found that there were installation issues with Vista that needed upgrades before it would function properly. The most useful new function should have been the Facial Retouch facility which will do three levels of automatic enhancement to improve detail and clarity. However, on the custom setting it failed to recognize four out of five faces in a group shot. What turned out to be the handiest ability in the end was the initial bringing together of all your photos so you can decide which ones to process.

Not to worry, we thought, the ESP 3 will make up for any software issues with either speed or quality of printing. Unfortunately there was more disappointment to come, for while we've come to predict that the fastest claimed speeds rarely match up in practice, Kodak's vaunted 30 pages per minute in black and 29 pages per minute in colour were well above the average 6ppm we experienced.

Quality also varied wildly: colours were more authentic and crisper when it came to scanning but printed photos had a lighter and yellower bias compared to the originals and there were clear banding issues on prints even at the highest quality settings. Black text emerged much better and perhaps if you're going for economy and are not too bothered about high quality pictures you can comfort yourself that the ink cartridges are much cheaper than rivals' products.

What should have been a standard, efficient and economic All-in-One has been sadly let down by slow speeds, below-par images and software failings, despite being cheaper in ink usage.