Dell 1320c
Review Tall and black, this big, square Dell cube makes its presence felt on the desk. Paper feeds from a decent-capacity, 250-sheet paper tray and there’s a single-sheet multipurpose feed, too. The control panel is simple, but includes warning LEDs built into a useful schematic of the printer.
What this Dell machine saves in desktop footprint, it makes up for in height. This is because the cartridge-integrated print engine runs vertically up the machine. It’s cunningly arranged inside with the drum units accessed from the front and the toner cartridges behind a door in the right-hand side panel.
This printer includes both USB and 10/100Mb/s Ethernet connections as standard, but you’re expected to run it from a PC - there’s no Mac or Linux support.
Dell rates the machine at 16ppm for black and 12ppm for colour, but we saw closer to 10ppm and 8ppm under test, neither of which is particularly impressive. Print quality is good, with clear black text and bright colours, though if you print photos, leave the colour settings on auto, as this produces better results than selecting portrait or landscape subjects manually.
Toner is a consumable, but replacement drum and fuser is included in the Dell service contract, so we’ve factored this into the running costs of the printer. Pricing up the high capacity cartridges produces a cost per page of 4.1p for black print and 13.1p for colour.
The colour cost is the lowest in the group but, paradoxically, the black print cost is the highest. ®
Next: HP Color LaserJet CP1215
COMMENTS
I love my Dell 1320C
... but it cost me under a hundred pounds. with a four year warranty. I should have bought 2 instead of one and some toner, I guess :-)
The economics are better for home users
There are some ridiculously low priced deals on the 1320c at the moment and I'm happy to say that I took advantage of one. Your estimate of page costs for home users needs to take into account that refilled toner cartridges are available at substantially lower cost than Dell's toners. For comparison, a set of 4 refilled cartridges is available for less than £50 from one supplier which is less than a single cartridge from Dell. That makes printed output substantially cheaper than your calculations. Business users, tied to a service agreement would probably be required to use Dell toners.
I'm very pleased with this printer - it is quick to launch from stand-by and in its 'Fine Photograph' setting can produce very bright and solid prints of photos,unlike the Standard setting which produces rather dark, flat prints. After settting it up I experienced a slight problem with registration but I went back into the set up and now I'm delighted with the output in all colours.
People complain about its footprint, but it is no larger than my A4 dye sublimation printer and it's also considerable lighter. This is an excellent printer for a small office or home.
1320c on Mac
There are mac drivers available from Dell support, and I can confirm that when instructed to print by a mac it (generally) does so.
Toners are not cheap though you'd be soft in the head to buy official Dell ones.
PC only???
The Dell works fine under Linux - just detects it as a PS network printer.
Never plugged anything into the USB port, but why would I want to?
1320c - Bit more detail
Just a little bit surprised that you didn't mention chipped cartridges on any of these printers.
I can speak from experience of the Dell 1320c. Once you have run your 1000/2000 pages, regardless of whether or not you have toner left in the cartridge, the printer refuses to print.
Now it's not surprising that Dell want to make money on the consumables, but what is farcical is that you can access the management utility and tell the printer that it has non-Dell cartridges installed - Restart the printer and without any further changes, it suddenly springs into life and quite happily goes on printing - and extra couple of hundred pages to date.
All that you lose from the point of functionality is that the warning lights about low toner now say on all the time. I can live with that - the quality of the printed page tends to be enough of a clue to low toner levels.
And BTW - it will support Linux - just needs a quick search on line for how to configure it to use near identical drivers - and it gets set up using lpd as an FX DocuPrint C525. Prints without issue!
