Dell Colour Laser Printer 3110cn review

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Verdict:

The 3110cn is quick, easy to maintain, cheap to run and can easily be upgraded if your needs change. Its print quality isn't the best, but if you use the PostScript driver it's perfectly acceptable. It's great value, and our Best Buy.

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: inc. VAT

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Despite a similar name, Dell's Colour Laser Printer 3110cn is quite different to the 3010cn we reviewed in What's New, Shopper December 2006.

The 3110cn reviewed here is a single-pass printer, with the fastest mono speed rating in this test. It's one of the biggest and heaviest devices here, and the only one with parallel, USB and Ethernet ports.

Setting up the 3110cn takes a while, as you need to insert its consumables before you can print. This isn't much trouble, though, and Dell's installation program is one of the best. It's the only program that includes options to install a mono-only driver or require a password to enable colour printing, both of which could lower costs among network users.

This printer has a 250-sheet paper cassette and a 150-sheet multipurpose tray, but the latter is formed by folding down the printer's huge front panel and requires a lot of space at the front. You can upgrade with a duplexer or a second, 550-sheet cassette, and increase the memory to a huge 1,152MB.

Colour prints from the 3110cn are decent, but not up to the standards of the Konica Minolta, Epson or Lexmark printers in this test. PostScript prints had an over-warm tone with a consistent sheen, while PCL prints had cooler, more natural colours, but a less rich finish. Colour graphics looked far better using the PostScript driver, which proved marginally quicker than using PCL on most of our tests.

The 3110cn is a very fast text printer, peaking at 27ppm when we printed our formal letter test using the PostScript driver. Only Epson's AcuLaser C1100 came close, but the 3110cn is comfortably quicker than the AcuLaser when printing in colour.

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