Dell Colour Laser Printer 3010cn review

The 3010cn is Dell's lowest-priced colour laser printer.

It costs slightly more than its cheapest entry-level competitors, which can be had for less than £200, but it has a higher specification than most budget models. Dell says it can print at up to 25ppm in mono and 5ppm in colour. It has a wired Ethernet port, but you can connect it over USB if you don't have a network.

Like Epson's AcuLaser C1100 (opposite), this isn't the easiest laser printer to set up. It's shipped without its consumables in place and you must insert them before printing. Dropping in the photoconductor drum is easy, but the toners are more of a challenge. Before you fit each one, you need to unpack it and remove the corresponding transit plug from the printer's carousel. With the consumables loaded and packing material extracted, the 3010cn calibrates itself for a while before it's ready to print. Dell's setup program was able to detect the printer on our labs network, which uses DHCP to allocate network addresses like a typical home router. The installer offers a choice of colour modes, which may prove useful if you need to limit the use of colour printing to those who really need it. You can install an unrestricted colour or mono-only driver, or specify a password to be entered before each colour job.

These options to restrict colour printing, are useful as the 3010cn isn't great value in this respect. Even if you never use it enough to need a replacement drum, each colour page will cost around 8p; a penny or two more than the AcuLaser C1100 and many other budget colour lasers we've tested. The 3010cn's mono costs are also slightly higher than we'd like, but they aren't unreasonable.

The 3010cn seemed slow to spool and start printing our Draft speed test and didn't quite reach its rated speed. When printing 50 copies of our formal letter, though, it completed the test at 25.6ppm, which is faster than its rated speed. Its four-pass print engine can't print colour pages as quickly, but its performance in our Normal speed test was competitive for an entry-level printer.

Printed text was up to the high standards we'd expect from a laser. Characters were black, with no traces of toner outside the outlines of each letter. Even tiny two-point text, which can occasionally appear messy from certain laser printers, was clean and legible. Colour prints were less impressive. Photos and colour graphics lacked the vibrancy of prints from the C1100 and their colours weren't especially accurate.

The 3010cn's Ethernet port makes it fair value, but its colour costs and print quality are disappointing. We'd pay an extra £26 for Epson's AcuLaser C1100N.