[Jarrett Kaufman @ Feb 6th 2007 2:00PM]

Chris: One could argue that at that low a cost, the fact that it's a five-color cartridge isn't that big a deal. That said, after reading the articles, it's actually NOT a five-color cartridge. It contains black (in addition to the other black cartridge), cyan, yellow, magenta, and a gloss optimizer (similar to Epson's Hi-Gloss UltraChrome system). No light cyan, no light magenta. They're claiming their small droplet sizes make up for this. Catch is, they don't HAVE small droplet sizes. Black and yellow print at 6.7 picoliters, and cyan and magenta at 2.7 picoliters. It wasn't until companies like Epson got to 1.5 picoliters and Canon at 1 picoliter that they felt comfortable releasing photo-quality models that didn't have the light colors, and even then Epson at least supplemented them with red and blue. And the only other Epson without the light-intensity colors are the new PictureMate-200 line, which boast not only a 2-picoliter droplet size (not a massive difference, but still smaller than Kodak's 6.7 and 2.7), but dye-based ink which produces a wider color gamut, better light differentials, scratch-resistance, and much, much better color blending due to the ink's ability to physically blend on the paper. Sounds like Kodak's mixing three-year-old (at newest) Epson-like technologies with modern-day ink usage trends. I'm less and less impressed by the minute.