Dell Color Laser Printer 3100cn Review

A Hard-Copy Heavyweight

Whether it's business letters or brochures, employee handbooks or color transparencies, Dell's Color Laser Printer 3100cn is a powerful solution to the printing needs of a small business. And with a well-equipped color laser of this quality available for $549 ($469 at presstime thanks to one of Dell's quick-changing discounts -- Ed.), there's simply no reason to hold back on bringing color capabilities into your office.

The 3100cn is the upgraded sibling of Dell's 3000cn ($449). Both are four-pass or rotary-design color lasers with 600 by 600 dpi resolution, rated at 25 pages per minute for monochrome and 5 ppm for color. Each comes with a 10/100BaseT Ethernet interface as well as USB and parallel ports, and offers a maximum duty cycle of 45,000 pages a month.

Compared to the 3000cn, the 3100cn adds a second, 250-sheet paper drawer as well as the built-in 150-sheet input tray. (A 500-sheet third drawer, bringing total paper capacity to 900 sheets, is $230 extra.) It also supports PostScript 3 as well as PCL 6 emulation and comes with full-capacity (4,000-page) toner cartridges, instead of the half-full starter cartridges that are the bane of printer buyers' out-of-the-box experience.

The Line on Lasers

Compared to inkjet printers, color lasers are faster and better for handling the volumes of pages that small businesses generate, and cost considerably less per page -- Dell estimates the 3100cn's consumables use at 1.5 cents per black-and-white and 9.9 cents per color page.

While inkjets do create more attractive color images, particularly when it comes to digital photographs on glossy paper, color laser printers do an excellent job of producing crisp text, graphics, and line art, and they produce adequate photos. The 3100cn comes with 64MB of memory upgradeable to 320MB -- a good option if you print a lot of high-resolution graphics.

As with many other affordable color lasers, the Dell's four-pass design slows printing considerably for color pages -- in our real-world tests, the C3100n more or less matched its advertised 5 ppm for color documents while producing black-and-white files at roughly 19 ppm. Black text was crisp and clear, and color images had decent saturation and accuracy.

As mentioned, the printer's black, cyan, magenta, and yellow toner cartridges have an estimated life of 4,000 pages (at 5-percent coverage); replacements are $95 each for the three color cartridges and $45 for a black cartridge, though Dell lets you save a few bucks with a four-pack -- one of each -- for $310. The imaging drum is a separate unit, estimated to last for 42,000 pages; a replacement costs $170.

In addition to letter- and legal-size paper, the Dell does an excellent job handling various media weights as well as 4 by 6-inch postcards, 3 by 5-inch index cards, custom-size banners (up to 8.5 x 17 inches), envelopes, transparencies, card stock, and labels. The combined 400-sheet input trays are matched by a 250-sheet output tray.

Out of the Box

The 3100cn is an absolute whopper at 16.9 by 16.3 by 18.2 inches, and it weighs a good 70 pounds with the second paper tray and consumables. Before buying such a printer, be sure you have the space and a desk or table that can support it.

While the printer is certainly sizeable, however, it's mostly self-contained: You won't find the usual assortment of protruding paper trays, and it needs no space beyond its original footprint.

A reference brochure offers advice on loading the paper trays and navigating the printer's front panel, but there's no quick-start-style document that walks you through the process of unpacking the printer and installing its main paper tray. In fact, the documentation doesn't mention how to do this at all, though you'll eventually find directions for installing the drum and toners buried near the middle of the manual. Note to Dell: Your customers shouldn't have to search for instructions.

Furthermore, the documentation doesn't mention the series of packing tabs that you need to remove from inside the printer before inserting the toner cartridges. Most people will eventually figure this out, but there's no good reason anyone should have to go through such a job without clear directions.

By contrast, Dell's software installation CD offers easy options for connecting the printer to a local PC or network, and the driver installs without any problems. The driver also lets you toggle between monochrome and color printing, using the more costly color toner only when printing important documents.

The 3100cn uses a toner management system that automatically monitors toner and consumables levels and displays them on the front LCD panel. The front panel also provides an easy way to configure the printer with a fairly intuitive menu system.

Dell covers the printer with one year of next-business-day on-site service, promising to have a certified technician at your doorstep within one day if over-the-phone troubleshooting fails to solve a problem. Upgrading this to three-year coverage costs $218.

While Dell can definitely improve on its documentation, the Color Laser Printer 3100cn produces crisp, attractive text and images at solid speeds for an excellent price.

Adapted from SmallBusinessComputing.com.

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