Multifunction Printer Review: Dell 3335dn

Our only hesitation in recommending the Dell 3335dn as a busy office's printer and copier is that its output tray isn't very big. At our office, the printer output tray is a social center second only to the water cooler; there's always somebody hanging around waiting for a print or copy job; but the Dell's 150-sheet output tray is simply the recessed space between the printer or base unit and the flatbed scanner/copier/fax/control panel mounted above it. Besides, with printing rated at 40 pages per minute, people won't get much chance to wait around for long.

The 3335dn is a $1,299 multifunction laser printer with black-and-white printing and copying and black-and-white and color scanning and fax (if it strikes you as pricey, there's a faxless model -- the 3333dn -- for $999). It has Ethernet and USB 2.0 connectivity and duplex (double-sided) printing standard, and a robust monthly duty cycle of 80,000 pages.

It helps to be a little robust yourself when wrestling the 50-pound printer out of its box. Setting up the 17 by 19 by 21-inch Dell is straightforward, if you're IT-savvy enough to answer questions ranging from your fax number to your SMTP e-mail gateway. The toner cartridge and photoconductor kit slide easily into place behind the front panel.

The main paper drawer holds 250 sheets; the front panel folds down to reveal an additional 50-sheet tray for envelopes or special media. The scanner is crowned by a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). We experienced no paper jams with any of the above. Refillophobes can expand the Dell's input capacity to 850 sheets with a 550-sheet second drawer for $200.

Dell sells 8,000- and 14,000-page use-and-ship-back black toner cartridges for $177 and $215, respectively. Counting all consumables, the company estimates that the 3335dn will set you back 1.65 cents per page.

Touch and Go

There's a 17-button keypad for things like entering fax numbers, but most of your interaction with the printer will be via its big (7-inch diagonal), bright color LCD touchscreen, which serves as everything from a customizable main menu to a hunt-and-peck QWERTY keyboard for typing e-mail addresses or headers and footers for copying jobs. Indexed help screens serve as a mini user's manual, while large icons and menus make navigation easy.

As a printer, the Dell excels, delivering crisp black text -- type was readable as small as 4 points -- and grayscale graphics. A one-page business letter printed in just seven seconds, while 20 pages of text took 36 seconds on separate sheets and 69 seconds in duplex mode. The printer did fall short of its advertised 40 ppm with our 55-page Acrobat document mixing text and graphics, however -- the job took a bit less than three minutes, a rate of 19 ppm.

If you've got the budget, we'd suggest upgrading the printer's 128MB of standard memory, especially since the 3335dn supports secure printing (holding a job until you enter a PIN number at its keypad) and other job-storage options normally seen in printers with their own hard disks. (An 80GB hard drive is a $430 option, while a 256MB flash module is $380.)

The 3335dn is also a capable walk-up copier, with simple controls and deft handling of all four permutations of single- and double-sided originals and copies. Using the ADF, four collated copies of a five-page document arrived in a quick 40 seconds.

Faxing is also straightforward, whether entering fax numbers via keypad or saving shortcuts for favorite recipients or groups of recipients, and duplex printing is available for incoming faxes. If you use the PostScript printer driver, you can fax from applications on a networked PC.

The Dell makes it simple to scan to e-mail or an FTP server, offering to save scanned documents as regular or password-protected PDFs or as TIF, JPG, or XPS files. Scanning to a PC, however, is a pain -- from your PC, you're supposed to enter the printer's IP address and create a scan profile first, then visit the printer to enter a shortcut number. It's considerably quicker and easier to scan a document to a USB flash drive inserted into the Dell's front-panel port, then copy the file from the flash drive to your PC.

Things like scan profiles and setup make us deem the Dell 3335dn better suited for a company that has at least one or two IT people than a small office with only the proprietor to serve as a part-time techie. But with that caveat, we're impressed with its output quality and flexibility. It's not cheap, but it's a solid choice among monochrome multifunction printers.