Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 944 review

Dell has a habit of giving its printers matter-of-fact names, and the Photo All-In-One Printer 944 keeps up the tradition.

It replaces the Photo All-In-One 942, reviewed in Labs, Shopper June 2005, and it looks and feels a lot better. This photo-orientated device is supplied with a black ink and three-colour cartridge but will print six-ink photographs if you buy an £18 Dell photo cartridge.

The 944's front panel has a PictBridge USB port and memory card slots that cover common formats. A hinged 6.3cm colour screen with a sharp picture is built in for direct printing and copying jobs. Dell's menu system is easy to understand, but it stopped responding a couple of times as we browsed an SD card full of high-resolution images.

In print tests, the 944 produced our 50-page draft text document at 13.4ppm, dropping to 8.6ppm when we increased the quality for our formal letter test. The text suffered from untidy outlines at all quality settings. The printer's results in our plain paper mixed-colour test were equally unimpressive, and its slow 1.6ppm performance was also poor.

Photos printed quickly with the standard four-ink setup: the printer took 15 minutes and 38 seconds to produce six borderless 6x4" shots. These lacked detail in the darkest regions and colours were oversaturated. When we repeated the test using six inks, there was little improvement to the speed but the results were much better.

The 944's scanner is quiet, but not particularly quick. Each preview took a reasonable 10.5 seconds, but the scanner needed 39 seconds to complete a 300dpi A4 scan. At higher resolutions, it was slower still, taking over three minutes to scan a 6x4" photograph at 1,200dpi. The images it captured had similar problems to the four-ink photo prints, with garish colours and little detail in areas of shadow.

Surprisingly, given its underwhelming print and scan performance, the 944 was a decent copier. The default quality setting produced reasonable results, with a colour A4 page taking 44.5 seconds and a mono page just 17 seconds.

Dell's figures suggest that each mono page costs three pence and each colour page 4.8p using high-yield supplies. Dell's cartridge prices include delivery, so the 944 should prove cheap to run. But it costs £20 more than Lexmark's P6350, which gave similar results when reviewed in What's New, Shopper December 2005.