Dell Laser Printer 1100 review

If you print lots of letters and other documents, you'll soon find an inkjet starts costing you an arm and a leg.

You're far better off with a black and white laser printer. Of course, you won't have the benefit of printing glossy colour photos, but your text and line drawings will be beautifully crisp. And you'll save lots of money.

The Dell 1100 is a laser printer that costs less than a hundred pounds - perfect for small businesses and home offices. It's one of the smallest lasers we've seen, taking up no more space than a typical inkjet. Lasers tend to be bulky, so this is good. The printer comes with a toner cartridge that will last 1,000 pages. Replacement cartridges last for 2,000 pages and cost £46 including VAT. That works out at 2.3 per page - rather costly for a laser.

Setup is easy. Installing the driver software on your PC is quick and simple. The toner cartridge slots into the printer without any hassle, and paper sits in an open tray that can take up to 150 sheets. The paper out tray is, however, too short for a piece of A4 paper unless you fold out an extender, though it is wide enough to stop paper curling up at the sides.

On the whole, the 1100 performed well in our tests. It clocked up 13.5 pages per minute in our text test - remarkably close to its quoted speed of 14 pages per minute. Printing our more complicated graphics test slowed the Dell down to 11.9ppm, which is still a good result.

Print quality was also good. Black text was crisp and clear, enabling even tiny 2pt text to remain legible. Our graphics test suffered from 'banding', where obvious stripes appear in the toner. This isn't designed for printing graphics, though, so we didn't hold that against it.

The Dell 1100 doesn't do badly for a budget printer, but we've seen better. Samsung's ML-1610, which we reviewed in issue 172, was cheaper to buy and run, printed faster and produced good results. So if you want a budget laser printer, buy the ML-1610.