Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 944 review

The All-In-One Printer 944 is Dell's latest multifunction device. It takes two cartridges at a time - a four-ink colour cartridge and either a black cartridge for printing text or a photo-cartridge.

As well as connecting to your PC, the 944 also has a PictBridge port, so you can print directly from compatible cameras, and a card reader that supports most formats, including compact flash and xD picture cards.

Direct print and copy jobs make use of a hinged 2.4in colour screen with a sharp picture. Dell's menu system is clear and easy to understand, but it stopped responding a couple of times as we browsed an SD card full of images.

The Dell's print speeds were good - 13.4 pages per minute (ppm) at draft quality and 8.6ppm at normal quality. This isn't anywhere near its quoted speed of 20ppm, but we've never seen a printer that does print at the speeds its manufacturers claim for it.

Unfortunately, this speed is achieved by sacrificing quality. Text looked slightly spidery, no matter what quality setting we used.

Using the standard colour cartridge, the 944 printed our six 6x4in borderless photos in 15 minutes and 38 seconds, again a good time. However, the quality wasn't that good - the prints lacked detail in the darkest regions and had over-saturated colours.

The 944's scanner is quiet, but not particularly quick. Each preview took 10.5 seconds, but the scanner needed 39 seconds to complete a 300 dots-per-inch (dpi) A4 scan. At higher resolutions it was slower still, taking over three minutes to scan a 6x4in photograph at 1200dpi. The images weren't that great either - colours were too garish and very little detail was captured in darker areas.

The 944 is quick at both printing and scanning, and it's cheap to run- but print and scan quality is middling.

Author: Peter Wood