Kodak also offers an Xtralife CMY ribbon, whose laminate protects your prints from the effects of fingerprints and fading. Setup was quick and virtually automatic. The printer cover swings up for easy ribbon installation, and navigating the control panel is fairly simple. You'll find, however, that most normal printing procedures are easy and trouble-free. Print output from the DS 8650 PS is among the best we've seen from a thermal dye printer.
Colors are rich and well saturated, with good detail in both shadow and highlights.
Blacks are crisp and dark, but CMYK blacks are marginally though not significantly darker than CMY blacks. The Kodak machine was faster on our speed tests than the other thermal dye units. It posted the best times on the Freelance Graphics, Microsoft Excel, and Freelance Transparency tests, beating the average time among our tested printers by several minutes per print.