Dell Colour Laser Printer 5110cn review

Dell's Colour Laser Printer 5110cn replaces the 5100cn, which won a Best Buy award in our Labs test in Shopper July 2006. The new printer looks almost identical and shares many features, but it has been substantially improved.

The 5110cn is a large and heavy single-pass colour laser that sits on a 500-sheet paper input cassette. Its fold-down multipurpose tray can take up to 150 sheets of paper. Unusually, envelopes are fed width-ways into the printer, but they emerge without creases in the 250-sheet face-down output tray.

This printer's toner yields have been increased over those of the 5100cn. It arrives with a 10,000-page standard-capacity black toner, which can be replaced with an 18,000-page high-yield supply for only £52. The 5110cn's colour toners are each good for 8,000 pages, with 12,000-page replacements each costing £165. Even including the cost of replacement drums every 35,000 pages, this is a cheap printer to run.

Apart from a bit of heavy lifting, there's little physical work to be done setting up the 5110cn. The toners arrive already fitted, and the drum drops straight into its slot. Dell's install program was unable to find the printer over our simple DHCP-enabled Labs network, however. We had to use the printer's control panel to find the IP address that it had leased, and input this into the installer before it could continue.

The install program is otherwise good, presenting an option to install a mono-only or password-protected colour driver, which is useful for network administrators seeking to control colour print costs. Both the PCL and PostScript drivers can be installed in a single operation.

Dell says the 5110cn is 5ppm faster than the 5100cn in mono, and 10ppm faster in colour. However, using the PCL driver it performed only marginally better. Using the PostScript driver, the 5110cn was much quicker to print mono text documents, peaking at 31.9ppm compared to 22ppm for the 5100cn.

The 5100cn's PCL driver's default settings produced poor-quality black text and lacklustre graphics. Although the 5110cn has a lower 600dpi resolution, its PCL results were a big improvement. Graphics and photos printed using the PostScript driver were excellent, though text wasn't as crisp and black as that printed with the PCL driver.

The 5110cn inherits all the strengths of the 5100cn, and Dell has also addressed that printer's weaknesses. The 5110cn is a robust, fast network colour laser with strong PCL and PostScript print quality. Though there are cheaper alternatives, the printer's 95,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle and very low running costs make it ideal for high-volume workgroup use.

Author: Simon Handby