10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Beautiful Color Printing and A Little Blackmail Too
Date of Review: Jul 29, 2006
The Bottom Line: The Dell3100cn is the best deal at this price range but they should find a better business model than blackmail. If you don't need as pretty pictures try the HP2600n
UPDATE: I am updating this review because I think I was a tad hard on this printer. After doing a bit of research trying to find one for my home office and going out to the store and testing printers, I think I may have jumped the gun a bit.
Using this printer was frustrating for several reasons that I have listed below, mainly wrinkling envelopes and margin shift, trouble feeding heavier paper and odd sizes and the blackmail for supplies.
Well after researching for nearly two days I have found that the problem with margin shift and the odd size paper problem can be solved. It's just that the machine and it's menus and such are not exactly intuitive and it will take you time and patience to discover it's mysteries. If you're willing to take a ride on the learning curve, be patient with tech support, peruse the Dell user forums and do a Google search or two, then it seems there's not too many problems that can't be solved except for the wrinkly envelope thing. As of today when I write this (August, 2006) there is still no solution for that).
There's also the bit with the blackmail for supplies (also described below) but it seems HP and others now do this as well (albeit with a manual overide) so maybe this is just one of those things you'll have to live with.
But it seems that if you're looking for a color laser printer in this price range, this one is actually the best bang for your buck. Even I admitted that it does excellently well with text and printing and the graphics are superb. My earlier rating was very low but I'm upping it two notches. Chalk this up to me admitting to be hard to please but still not liking blackmail.
That being said, my initial review is below.
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I used this printer as a church secretary for a solid year.
As a basic laser printer it does beautifully. What I put on the screen and what I got back were identical. It prints lovely colors in every shade and hue you can think of. It does excellent and speedy black & white printing as well.
There is also good support for it on the Dell website. Tech support was helpful and the Dell Message Board Forums are a great resource as well. However there are some problems you don't find out about until you need those forums or support and here are the things I did not like:
It leaves extra space on the left margin. You must always account for this and there is no fix for it.
There is about a 45 - 90 second wait sometimes from the time you hit print to the time the printer whines to a start.
It will wrinkle your envelopes. Every single one of them. If you don't do a lot of mailings, you won't care. If you were like me doing two or three mailings a week or do creative projects with envelopes (we used color printed envelopes for a "Welcome Packet") then you will go mad. It wrinkles envelopes terribly. This is well documented in the user forums and there is no fix for it. In the end, we stopped using it for envelopes altogether and went back to using the inkjet just to save the headache.
It does the infamous newfangled thing where it blackmails you for toner or a drum cartridge and ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT WORK AT ALL UNTIL YOU REPLACE IT WITH A NEW ONE. I think if I'm willing to work with reduced capacity that's my business. Dell seems to think that they should break the machine that I paid good money for until I absolutely order more toner or a drum cartridge from them.
The drum cartridge was $169. The Toner for a case of the four colors was around $80-90 (can't remember off the top of my head). At any rate, I was not happy and basically felt that this machine held me hostage until I gave in. Yes it warns you ahead of time but I feel this is unreasonable.
One last thing, you cannot use heavier cardstock or coverstock from the main tray, you must use it from the MPF tray (which I always called the MF tray).
About the MPF tray: Using it hijacks your settings in MS Word and you have to go back into the print settings in Word to get it print from default tray. It took me two calls to tech support to find that out.
Also, although it is better about using cover & cardstock from the MPF it still has difficulties feeding through and sometimes jams although jams are easy to clear from this machine and it doesn't jam often. Not with a real jam anyway. If for any reason the paper doesn't feed through it says it's a jam and then you spend fifteen minutes searching the machine only to find that simply opening the cover and closing it again would have sufficed.
Maddening, I tell you simply maddening.
However it did print well on plain paper and on glossy paper which was nice because we did quite a bit of wedding brochures on glossy paper. Again, the plain black & white printing was flawless and I was happy with it.
I'd recommend it, but I don't like this bit about not working until you buy more stuff. I think that is an awful thing to do customers and I would never buy one for my own home office for that reason alone.
