In my experience, printers fall into the category of "get a nerd to set it up for you". In other words, it is a type of technology that girls aren’t usually good at installing themselves. Like a new motherboard or fiddling with IP addresses and what not when you have to configure a new e-mail account. 

So for this Snapshot review, I have banished my IT guru husband from the study while I set up this all-in-one (print, copy and scan) inkjet printer without any help. After all, I am the target market for the Kodak ESP C110 All-in-One Printer. It’s designed for use in a small home office, probably a work-from-home mom. Even the box shows the C110 printing out a full-colour photo of an adorable toddler missing his two front teeth! 

Installing printers for noobs >>

The packaging warns me that there is no USB 2.0 cable included in the box. Which is fine, because I have loads – but I wonder how many other work-from-home-moms have a drawer full of them? When I open the box there’s a handy pamphlet that says ‘Start Here’. It says there’s a set-up video on the Kodak website. Helpful! Unfortunately there is no set-up video for my particular device, though, unless it’s under some other model number. So not very helpful, then...

Still, the Start Here pamphlet has step-by-step illustrations. ‘Remove all orange tape’ it suggests, and here is where Kodak wows the peddle-pushers off me. This orange tape thing is clever, and I’m impressed by how lovingly this printer has been boxed up, to make it easy for a noob like me to unpack at home without calling Dial-a-Nerd.

Next step: power cables (there’s even a sticker on the printer that shows you: ‘Power cable goes in here, dumbass.’) 

Then you push the flashing green power button, choose your language and country (more brownie points for the options for ‘English (International)’ and South Africa) and flip open the top of the C110, which pops open like the hood of a car.

Next step is to put in the cartridge holder, and the set-up pamphlet has an amusing illustration showing that it needs to make an audible ‘click!’, which is does to my delight. 

In goes the black cartridge, in goes the colour cartridge (click, click) and by now Kodak has blown me away with its clever, intuitive packaging. Tear here! Hit OK! Pull out this tray. Drop in some printing paper! Wait five minutes! Now press start! (You have to be an idiot to screw this up.)

The printer installer disc asks me to accept some user agreement stuff, then prompts me to register (which I politely decline), then downloads a 13MB update without asking, which is kind of rude in a broadband-poor country like South Africa. It then downloads another 3.21MB ‘prerequisite component’.

While all this downloading and installing is going on, a little presentation tells me: “You haven’t just bought a printer, you’ve bought a whole printing system!’ I would imagine this means that bloatware is being dropped onto my computer desktop as I type this. (Five minutes later...) Yup, there it is. 

I’ll report back in the in-depth review on printer page speeds and how long the cartridges last. The extra large cartridge retails for only R299, and promises to print out 550 full-colour pages. Now, not too long ago I priced a cartridge for my HP black-and-white laser printer, and it was close on R600. Bargain!

I’ll also confirm whether the C110 has all the other features Kodak promises:

• Barcoded Kodak paper adjust print settings automatically
• Print dries in an instant and lasts a lifetime
• Print directly from iPhone, iPod or iPad
• Home centre software helps create and edit with ease
• Print video frames from .avi and .mov files
• Create and print amazing 3D photos
• Get better, brighter photos with Kodak Perfect Touch technology
• Reduce red eye, fix blemishes and skin tones
• Unleash the power of your photos, even those found on your fav sites (Facebook, Flickr etc) 

At the last hurdle, I had to call my IT guru hubby back into the study, as the installation wizard would only let me connect the print to my laptop via USB, and we need network printing. Le sigh... I knew it was too easy!