Dell 1320c

A laser printer can be better than an inkjet if you print more text-heavy documents than photographs - the cost of each printer page is generally lower from a laser than from an inkjet.

Even better, colour-laser printers are getting cheaper all the time. The Dell 1320C is a colour-laser printer with both USB and network connections so you can plug it straight into a computer or plug it into a router to share it over your home network.


As far as laser printers go, the 1320c is not bad looking and it's certainly well made. The doors and buttons are all sturdy and we liked the simplicity of the printer’s interface. The only downside we could find was the paper tray, which only holds 250 sheets of A4.
The 1320c produced some really impressive text during our tests with sharp and well-defined characters. It was fast, too, with just eight seconds needed to print a page of text. A ten-page print took just under a minute.

The really outstanding performance came with our test document that mixed graphics and text as a business or school presentation would. The printer gave brilliant colour reproduction and sharp rendition of both images and text, something we were very impressed with considering its price.

It's not too loud either. We have tested some laser printers that sound like a jet engine powering up, but this one was pleasingly quiet.

Inkjet printers have lower ink capacities and are more expensive to run for longer periods, but you need to take into account the price when replacing the toner in a laser printer too.

At the time of this review a full set of high-capacity toner cartridges costs £220, which is slightly more than the cost of the printer. The cartridges that come with the printer have lower capacities but still the replacement cost is high.

The Dell 1320c performed well and produced results far above expectation, but the price of replacement toner will put many people off.

http://www.computeractive.co.uk/computeractive/hardware/2253718/dell-1320c

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Dell ships fastest office color laser printer, two others

Dell on Tuesday released three commercial workgroup printers meant for use by businesses. This includes the 5130cdn, which is being touted as the world’s fastest single function letter-size office color laser printer; the 7130cdn, Dell’s first LED color printer with tabloid-size printing capability; and the Dell 3330dn, a high-performance monochrome laser printer. The 5130cdn can print up to 47 single-sided pages and 37 double-sided, letter-sized pages per minute in either black and white or full color.

The 5130cdn also uses ColorbyDell technology, which increases print quality, color saturation and image sharpness. System administrators can opt for Dell's ColorTrack Pro software, which lets them monitor and control use of the 5130cdn by other users on the network. It otherwise has an 800MHz processor and 256MB of RAM. Users interface with the printer through a 160x64-pixel LCD display.

The 7130cdn is Dell’s first LED-based color printer and can print tabloid-sized pages in Pantone full color. It can accommodate numerous paper sizes, and has a fast 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, with up to 4GB optional. Print speeds are fixed at 35 pages per minute, and there is a 128x64-pixel LCD display to navigate the interface.

The black and white 3330dn is the relative entry level and can print up to 40 letter pages per minute. It draws on a 466GHz CPU along with 64MB of RAM and uses a four-line display.

All three have 1200x1200dpi printing resolutions, USB 2.0 interface and an Ethernet port for network sharing. The Dell 5130cdn costs $1,549, the 7130cdn is priced at $2,799, while the 3330dn costs $599. All are available now.

Dell 5130cdn

Dell 7130cdn

Dell 3330dn

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