Dell 2145cn colour laser

Set up is reasonable straightforward, as the printer uses combined drum and toner cartridges for each colour of print. Fold down the front panel and you have access to the cartridges, stacked one above the other. Software installation is also simple and Dell provides both PCL 6 in emulation and genuine Adobe Postscript Level 3. Drivers are available for Windows, from 2000 on and in 32 and 64-bit variants, OSX from 10.3 and Linux. Distributions supported include Red Hat 8-9, Fedora Core 1-4, Mandrake 9.2-10.1 and Suse 8.2-9.2.

A tall machine, because the cartridges are stacked up

Having duplex print support in a mid-range colour laser is unusual but, when combined with duplex scanning, it opens up several new copy combinations. It’s easy enough to copy single-sided sheets to a duplex output document using the ADF. It’s also possible to produce a duplex copy from a duplex original, though some fiddling is needed on the control panel, to set up the right options.

Dell claims a top print speed of 20ppm for this machine, in both black and colour. As usual, the speed is a best-case result and in the real world, where you’re twiddling your thumbs waiting for a print job to complete, you're looking at speeds between 7ppm and 14ppm, depending on the length of the document.

At 7ppm, the kind of speed you'll see for typical five-page prints, you could find yourself waiting for jobs to complete, particularly if the 2145cn is highly utilised. Documents containing colour don't take any longer than straight black text jobs, though. Duplex text pages take around twice the speed of the simplex page, which is what you’d expect.

A five page, black text copy from the ADF took 36 seconds, which is a reasonable speed, but a 10-page, duplex copy took 3m 50s, which is slow. This is a shame, as we suspect most people will go for simplex copying to save time, rather than saving paper. Print quality is above average. Black text from the 600dpi print engine is sharp and shows no signs of spatter. Print is heavy enough to be seen clearly, without overdoing emboldened characters and printed rules.

Socket to me: handy USB port (right) for file printing or scanning using a flash drive

Colours in business graphics are over-vivid, in some cases taking them quite a way from the originals seen on screen. Although you can use colour matching to improve things, when using default settings the colours vary more than with some rival models. It’s slightly unexpected, then, that our test photo print reproduced rather better, with more natural colours and good levels of detail. A 15 x 10cm photo completed in 36 seconds.