DELL MIGHT NOT be the first brand you think of when it comes to printers, but the company has been selling its own brand printers for quite some time. However, its latest models stand out from the crown as not only are they using LED technology rather than a laser, but even the most basic models offer full colour support at up to 10 pages per minute.
Dell is offering three different models, although all appear to feature similar base spec. The most basic model is the 1250c and you can tell that this is the cheapest model out of the lot simply because unlike most printers today, it lacks a status LCD display and instead rely on 11 “graphically lit” LED lights to tell you when you run out of toner or when there’s a paper jam. It has a 150 sheet paper tray and it can hold 100 sheets of printed content. The unspecified processor ticks away at 192MHz and the printer has 64MB of RAM and 2MB of ROM. The 1250c connects via USB 2.0 and Dell offers Windows and Mac OS drivers for it. No word on Linux drivers. The standard toner cartridges are good for 700 pages with high capacity options doubling that number.
The next model up is the 1350cnw and this model not only adds an LCD display, albeit a very basic two-line text only affair, but it also ups the print speed to 12 pages per minute in colour. It also gets a 10-sheet bypass drawer for the ability to quickly be able to change paper. A faster processor – again of unknown type – is part of the package, this time it’s clocked at 384MHz and Dell has doubled the RAM to 128MB while the ROM has grown to 8MB. The N and the W in the model name standards for Network and Wireless respectively and the 1350cnw features both wired 10/100Mbit Ethernet and support for Wi-Fi, although Dell hasn’t specified at what speed.
Finally we have the 1355cn/cnw which is an all-in-one printer that appears to share its base spec with the 1350cnw, but adds copy, scan and fax support to the mix. The 1355 comes with wired Ethernet as standard, but Wi-Fi will cost extra on this model. There aren’t too many details on the 1355 as yet, since it won’t launch until November, while the other two models have already gone on sale.
Dell’s claim to world’s smallest colour “laser class” printer is based on the fairly compact measurements of 394x300x255mm for the 1250c and 1350cnw. This would only really matter if you’re really tight on space, but do keep in mind that the paper tray fold out the front of the printers and take up a bit of extra space. The 1250c is priced at $229 which seems quite reasonable for what’s on offer, especially when you consider that this is a colour “laser class” printer we’re talking about. The 1350cnw will set you back another $100 at $329, but again this isn’t terrible considering the spec bump and extra networking features. Finally the 1355cn will cost $399 and the 1355cnw $449.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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