Affordable all-in-ones are now common enough to begin replacing dedicated peripherals on a consumer level, offering an impressive degree of functionality and performance for the home user. Kodak's EasyShare 5300 is the lower-end model from its new range, omitting the fax functionality and some other minor features from the 5500 but throwing in a substantial saving. Despite its fairly low-end price tag it's a pretty bulky unit, which might put some users off if portability is at a premium.

As you'd probably expect, considering the manufacturer, the 5300 is a tad more oriented towards photo printing than most all-in-ones. You'll find a built in 4x6-inch tray, multi-card reader and external USB port for instant photo printing, managed well by the 3-inch colour display and dedicated controls.

Paper management is handled well: a retractable shelf holds standard prints and the photo tray can be enabled by sliding it forwards into the printer for producing 6x4-inch snaps. Performance is very good here, and although standard text printing isn't particularly fast, we were impressed by its photo capabilities, and the quality of prints across the board can't really be faulted.

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Photographs are accurate and sharp, with the option to use Kodak's Perfect Touch technology for fast and easy image enhancement. Monochrome prints show deep and clear blacks with very little bleed, particularly using dedicated inkjet paper. Based on the speeds, which we'll come to in a minute, many users might prefer to use the draft setting for text which, while appearing more dark grey than black, offers far quicker speeds.

A full A4-sized photograph took around two minutes to finish, with a 6x4-inch print appearing in about 50 seconds, although you'll see results around 20 percent quicker if you print directly from memory card. Speeds didn't appear to differ much when comparing straight text documents to files that include pictures: two full pages take around 50 seconds at normal quality but this drops right down to 15 seconds in draft mode.

The copier is also quite reliant on quality settings in terms of producing fast duplicates, typically involving a one minute wait for full colour pages and about half that for text. Copies are fairly consistent but we did notice a drop in sharpness for text prints. Scans appear in your choice of application in around 20 seconds, a pretty reasonable time by any standards.

Generally the 3-inch display and corresponding controls make it very easy to manage all of this from the printer itself, as well as obviously giving you the ability to preview and print photos directly. Another very important point in products of this nature is replacement ink/paper costs, something that Kodak has paid particular attention to. You'll find colour prints can be produced from as little as 7p each at lower quality settings, and about 50 percent more when you jack things up to the maximum, which is still a lot cheaper than most rivals.

So far then, at least in terms of performance and usability, the 5300 is doing very well, but unfortunately we didn't come to these conclusions without a few problems along the way.

Despite very carefully installing the various components and successfully completing a calibration routine we notice a couple of 'fatal' errors during our initial prints. Updating the firmware seemed to ward these off for a short time, but different error messages occurred shortly after. All printers occasionally throw up an error or two, but most frustrating about the Kodak is that you're only given an error code and helpful instructions of 'Call Service'.

There appear to be no error code translation documents on Kodak's site nor any real way to find out why the device was going wrong. These faults eventually went away using one of the two techniques that tend to work around 90 percent of the time in these situations - turn it off and on again (the other being give it a kick).

Along with this, some users may be a tad put off by the size of the 5300, and relatively slow text printing at normal resolutions means it's more suited to those looking to utilise its photo capabilities. Additionally, you don't seem to have a lot of control over quality levels when printing photos from Kodak's provided software, although printing from supported applications offers a typical set of options.

Considering the price of the Kodak and the impressive performance on offer we still liked the 5300, despite the odd error or two. There's enough going for it to make this forgivable on an occasional basis, it's particularly impressive in its photo capabilities and it performs solidly in most other areas.