Dell Color Laser 1320c review

The 1320c is Dell's most compact colour laser printer, with a footprint small enough to squeeze on to the most cramped of desks.

The slick black styling is far easier on the eye than most beige plastic printers, and Dell has made sure setup is as straightforward as possible. Slot the install disc in your drive and you'll be greeted by a full step-by-step video guide to setting up your printer.

The side door clicks open for access to the four toner cartridges. Dell provides a starter set with enough toner for 1,000 sheets in each colour. Standard replacements last twice this long. The cartridges lock into place very simply, and the print mechanism is quickly removed and set up by turning four locks inside the front. The standard model we reviewed has just a USB connection, but an optional network-enabled model is also available for an additional £23.50, which in our eyes is a worthy investment, as it makes sharing the printer over a network really easy.

There's a tray for 150 sheets of plain paper and a single-sheet front feeder for more unusual sizes and formats, but we were a little disappointed by the 1320c's print speeds. Using the toner-saver option in the driver, we printed our 50-page document at a speed of 11.7ppm, somewhat short of Dell's claimed 16ppm. It also pauses every ten or so pages. The better news is that speeds didn't drop too much when we switched to colour, with a rate of 10.1ppm, which was pretty close to the claimed 12ppm.

The 1320c's quality really shines through in colour documents. It produced impressively bold and glossy prints, with perfectly sharp characters and vivid colours. Mono text was a little poorer, with very minor feathering around the edges, but that's being overly critical; all in all we were pleased with the quality of prints.

Dell quotes a running cost of 1.7p per mono page, which is towards the upper end of the scale for a laser printer, but the Toner Management software in the driver should keep you informed when your cartridges are running low, and you can opt to conserve toner, too. What may put you off more, though, is the high price: £222 is dear even for a colour laser printer. Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2500W is over £50 less, costs almost the same to run and has similar print quality. For those on a tight budget, it remains our recommended colour laser printer.

Author: David Bayon