Dell Mutifunction Colour Laser Printer 3115cn review

Dell's printer-naming policy should leave you in little doubt about what the Multifunction Colour Laser Printer 3115cn does.

It's based on a fast, single-pass colour laser print engine that can produce up to 30 monochrome pages per minute, or 17 in colour. You can't fail to notice the 3115cn's integrated scanner and automatic document feeder, which projects up from the device's main body.

The 3115cn is particularly tall, deep and heavy. If you're easily annoyed by warning beeps, you might want to wear ear plugs while setting it up. Almost every conceivable action or status event causes a beep or two, including maddeningly persistent warnings while you load paper into the fully enclosed input tray. We spent ages navigating through the menu turning off no fewer than 11 warnings before discovering an option at the end of the list that disabled all tones.

Before the 3115cn is ready for use, you need to unlock its scanner's head, remove some packaging and insert four toner cartridges. These are a little tricky to handle and fit the other way round than you might expect. We managed to get a small amount of toner on our hands in the process.

Dell's setup program couldn't detect the printer on our labs network, but we were able to print a setup page confirming the IP address that it had leased from our router. Supplied with this, the installer finished without a hitch.

Dell's installer lets administrators limit access to colour printing, which is more expensive than mono printing. You can choose to install a mono-only driver, or specify a password that must be supplied before colour jobs are permitted. The printer supports PCL and PostScript print languages. You can install drivers for both without having to re-run the setup program.

In common with most network-capable printers, the 3115cn has a web-based configuration interface. If you want to scan over the network, you'll need to use this to define and configure each target computer. We found it hard to configure successfully and were only able to test the 3115cn's scanner over a USB connection. It performed quickly up to its maximum 600 dots per inch resolution, completing previews in just seven seconds.

Captured images were better than we'd expect from an office-oriented scanner, with faithful colours and well-preserved detail in very light and dark areas. They were acceptably sharp, but scans of office documents seemed a shade too light.

This is one of the fastest copiers we've tested, with a single mono page taking just under 10 seconds and a colour page taking 18.5 seconds. Using the ADF to make a mono copy of a 10-page document took just 39.5 seconds. Mono results were accurately exposed and clear, but colour pages took on a blue cast and were not as well focused.

We completed our print tests using both the PCL and PostScript drivers. Simple text documents printed marginally quicker using PostScript, while colour jobs such as our photo tests and colour Normal speed test were faster using PCL. The 3115cn produced excellent, crisp black text using either driver. Using the PCL driver, colour jobs appeared a bit dull. Colour accuracy was improved with the PostScript driver, but light regions of our photo tests suffered from a loss of detail.

The 3115cn scans high-quality images, but capturing them over the network isn't as straightforward as we'd like. Though it's impressively quick, particularly when printing mono documents, its colour print quality is a little disappointing. This is a great choice if low running costs are essential, but Epson's AcuLaser CX11NF produces better-quality results.