Dell 3100cn review

Matt Lake CNET

Published: 15 Nov 2004

Although it tips the scales at 33kg and dazzles the eye with great output, the Dell 3100cn is too slow to bill itself as an office champion. Still, this colour-laser does a great all-around job at printing; its colour graphics are exceptional, with the photographic clarity you'd expect from an inkjet, without the smeared edges that can plague fresh inkjet prints. As for black text, the staple of laser printing, the clarity of the Dell 3100cn's output ranks among the best, including that of the HP Color LaserJet 3500 and the 2550. Plus, with a base price of £293 (ex. VAT), the Dell 3100cn is a reasonable buy for a networked printer, and the printing cost per page is also modest: each black text page costs 0.61 pence, while colour pages cost 5p each. So, what's the drawback? If time is money, the 3100cn will leave you a pauper. With its standard out-of-the-box settings, this printer plods along at 4.5 pages per minute, whether producing text or graphics, colour or monochrome. That's not terrible for colour printing, but it's too sluggish to compete in a heavy text-printing environment, especially in a workgroup.

Design

The boxy grey tower of the Dell 3100cn might overshadow other equipment in your work area. You might want to give this 53.3cm-high printer its own desk to handle its hefty 33kg, even though it takes up only a 42cm-square footprint. This printer includes a beefy 400-sheet paper tray and four 4,000-page toner drums, but features only three front-mounted buttons below its blue-light LCD screen: menu and cancel buttons and a select button surrounded with four-way arrow keys. This turns any adjustment you need to make into a menu-driven ordeal, such as the six-step process of changing the paper-input size settings.

The Dell 3100cn features a toner carousel, which rotates the single black and three colour cartridges, one at a time, to the front of the machine for replacement. This design forces you to consult the LCD to move colours one by one to the front, so you can't manually pop cartridges in and out of the machine as easily as you can with the Oki C5200n. Flipping open the toner compartment before it loads is tricky; we suffered more than one spill. If you don't mind dealing with the moving parts inherent in the carousel design, the Dell 3100cn might work for you; otherwise, you should consider a machine with more straightforward cartridge changes, such as the Oki C5200n color LED printer.

This printer comes with three ports: USB 2.0, parallel, and RJ-45 for network printing. Dell supplies an Ethernet cable, but a USB 2.0 cable will cost you an extra £3.60 (ex. VAT). The Dell 3100cn supports three page-description languages: PCL6, PCL5e and PostScript 3, and it comes with 81 fonts and Symbol Sets, 35 PCL fonts and 136 PostScript fonts. This allows for compatibility with multiple fonts, high-end graphics and publishing software.

We reviewed the 3100cn model using Windows XP, with the £125.10 (ex. VAT) additional 500-sheet paper tray. You can also add a £179.10 (ex. VAT) duplexer that enables two-sided printing; with this unit, the driver software allows you to create n-up booklets that shrink several documents to fit onto one sheet of paper. The £472 (ex. VAT) total for the printer plus the duplexer is reasonable, but add the 500-sheet feeder, and you'll creep up into the price stratosphere.

Features

The Dell 3100cn is a versatile printer with loads of connectivity options and support for Windows, Mac and Linux computers. This printer ships with a standard 64MB of RAM, enough to support a workgroup of about 10 people.

The printer driver software we tested under Windows was capable enough, although it's nothing to write home about. Once you install driver software for the Dell 3100cn, an always-on status monitor warns you of low toner levels, paper jams and paper outages. The Now Printing window tracks the toner levels in each of the four colours and links to an advert for purchasing new supplies; this pitch can become wearing after a while. The status monitor is rudimentary, offering only basic messages, such as Now Printing and Paper Jam, without true troubleshooting tools. A program inserted into your Windows Start menu during installation enables you to buy supplies via the Web using your printer's serial number.

In addition to covering the usual bases such as paper size, type and orientation, the driver software provides some fancy options. You can change the brightness, the contrast and the colour values of documents; add custom or preset watermarks; and print 2x2, 3x3, and 4x4 poster prints with crop marks. Irritating, though, is an omnipresent booklet-printing option that returns an error message unless you have installed Dell's £179 (ex. VAT) duplexing unit.

Performance

We were impressed by the Dell 3100cn's print quality. Black text was crisp and legible even at the smallest font sizes. Greyscale graphics showed even gradients and fine, sharp details. Colour text was decent but became blurry in some torture-test formats, such as bold maroon and dark green letters. For a laser printer, the colour graphics and even the photographs were exceptional, with great colour matching and smooth gradients. At first glance, we assumed the Dell 3100cn's test photo prints came from a colour inkjet. You should still rely on a photo-grade printer to produce snapshots and portraits, but the Dell 3100cn beats any inkjet if you need to mix text and graphics. Despite these high colour-laser compliments, at the rate of between 4 and 5 pages per minute, the Dell 3100cn is slow at delivering black text. By the time this machine prints its first page of plain text, an HP Color LaserJet 2550 or an Oki C5200n would have finished its third sheet. The extra time doesn't provide better-quality text than from those other laser printers, either. Still, the Dell 3100cn's great colour pages finish at a more comparable speed, and it's only marginally slower at colour graphics than the Samsung CLP-500 and the HP Color LaserJet 2550.

Service & support

Setting up the Dell 3100cn doesn't require the manual to be opened at all. The step-by-step setup poster makes installing toner, connecting to a computer or a network, and configuring software drivers a piece of cake.

The Dell 3100cn provides an industry-standard one-year warranty, but Dell boosts this with a generous next-day onsite-service offering. You can upgrade the warranty to cover three years for an extra £129 (ex. VAT). Phone support is also available during the warranty period. Dell's Web site offers top-notch customer service and support options for your specific product, including support history, an extensive database of FAQs, driver downloads, documentation and tutorials on graphics troubleshooting, plus how-tos and maintenance. The driver software itself provides a quick and easy way to order replacement supplies: just click an on-screen link to go straight to a Web order form.

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