Quite a stunner - especially for the price!

The time had finally come - a new color laser printer was required for my office. The prior model, a Minolta (see review), had damaged its controller card and was not worthy of the repair expense.

Color laser printers have made tremendous inroads in the last 3 years since the introduction of the original "affordable" color laser printer, the Minolta/QMS Magicolor 2200 DeskLaser. Quality is up, speed is up and prices are down.

But which to choose? Many professional reviews do not make the job any simpler, due to their attentions being in the wrong place for a color laser printer. Many laser printer reviews focus on text quality, speed and B&W graphics. So, after much research based upon my requirements - quality color output - and years of experience with the technology I settled on the Dell 3100cn color laser printer. If you keep a careful eye on Dell's web site you can catch a discount sale making this printer very price appealing.

When it arrives at your door you are greeted with quite a substantial box - about 40 inches by 24 inches by 24 inches and over 60 pounds. The interior packing is only average - when I received my (first) unit the box had been opened and all parts were missing. Dell was very prompt sending me a completely new replacement unit, not simply replacing the missing parts. If your UPS district is notorious with manhandling boxes the unit might not make it to you in one piece.

Inside the box you find the main unit, the auxiliary lower feed tray, the toner cartridges, the imaging unit, cables and instructions. The pleasant surprise is the design - 4 toner cartridges and a imaging unit seemingly making up the entirety of the normal consumables. As I owned a earlier generation with 4 toners, drum, transfer belt, laser shield, oil roller and waste tank the lower amount of consumables present was a very nice surprise; it will hopefully allow for lower costs of running thanks to reduced demands.

Assembly of the unit is rapid and documented with a large poster lying on top of the unit. Place the lower tray into the final work position, place the printer on top, lock the lower tray to the main unit, power up and install all consumables when asked to. Very neat and tidy.

The unit has parallel, USB 2.0 and 100BaseT ports. I highly recommend the Ethernet connection as full page color pages can get into the range of 40 megabytes, or even more. Software setup is easy on Windows XP with auto scan for the printer on the network and two setup routines - one for direct connect (parallel / USB) and another for network. All necessary software is installed in one shot.

Once assembled, connected and software installed it is pretty much ready to run. The unit has a fast warm-up time to first page and, thanks to being supplied with 2 paper trays, is ready to handle 2 types of paper stock simultaneously. These settings, and many more, are available using your choice of either your computer's printer driver or the built-in web based printer status and configuration page accessible through any web browser. With readouts of toner supply left, status, printer condition and full setup routines the web interface offers an administrator almost anything he or she needs. The printer driver offers these controls (though not quite as well laid out) plus adjustments for picture quality including tonal balance.

Out of the box the unit is configured for normal resolution and modest quality, but highest speed. A few setting changes later and the unit was set to produce its best quality output. My unit showed very good sharpness but oversaturation leading to "halos" and a blue cast, even after I manually set the color to 6500K base. The tonal balance adjustments came to the rescue, and with a bit of time spent I adjusted the color to significantly better than I feel I have ever gotten with any other mid-priced color laser printer. With settings of:

8 brightness, -10 contrast, -20 saturation, 1 low magenta, 2 medium magenta and 1 high magenta

output on plain paper gave a 6 color inkjet - an Epson 1280 Photo - a really good run for the money (all things considered)...at a speed probably 10 times as fast. This unit might not be true "photo quality" but it is stunningly close for a office laser printer.

The unit has a fast first page out time thanks to a well designed 300mHz controller that begins warming up the unit as it receives the data download - doing 2 things at once. It comes standard with 64MB of RAM and can accept 1 RAM module - in the laptop-standard SO-DIMM design - for memory upgrades. I highly recommend purchasing memory immediately, or with the unit, for 64MB is insufficient for a full-page graphic. With an additional 256MB of RAM the unit can handle almost any data stream presented to it.

The bonus of this unit, for those into serious office requirements, is the PostScript 3 emulation built in. Not many units at this price range have this feature therefore allowing more professionally oriented jobs, produced with advanced page layout programs, to be processed with a minimum of fuss. Once color calibrated, in conjunction with PS3, this unit makes quite a nice little small office pre-production proofer and small production run printer - during my color calibration I used a professionally produced offset print to judge output against. It held up, considering its office status, surprisingly well and on plain paper to boot! But it is not just limited to plain paper - labels, cover and thick stocks like matte-coated laser paper are all available via the paper settings.

For a 4-pass laser it is somewhat quick and relatively quiet. A 1-pass printer is faster with multiple pages, but the Dell has an excellent processor making the first page output seem fast. It is quieter than the equivalent HP and the previous generation Minolta.

The 3100cn's negatives are few. It is not a small printer, less so with the additional supplied tray installed, but more tall than wide and deep. A bit of space may be required.

The printer driver's network port does not seem to allow a reset of the IP address once installed (a common failing). This is a problem since the Dell comes configured from the factory for DHCP on the IP services. If the DHCP server supplies the printer with a new address the printer will fail to print and the driver does not seemingly allow configuration changes to match. This happened to me and I finally set the printer to manual IP addresses, programming in the original details. I would recommend supplying this unit with a static IP address either via reconfiguration of your DHCP server or manually via the printer's LCD 2-line control panel.

The Dell is based upon a Xerox engine according to the online reviews, one that is not available in the United States except through Dell. This means that, at this point, supplies are only available through Dell. The unit does come with full, 4,000 page toner cartridges - a welcome bonus in a day of half-full "starter" cartridges. This gives you a nice bonus for the initial purchase.

So far my experience with the unit has been fantastic. It supplies one of the best outputs I have seen in a modest size, (very!) modest cost "office" network color printer quickly, fairly quietly...and let's not forget for a relative song in price!! A bargain by any means!

[Edit: additional information, for the color-picky] Upon a full linearazation and profile of (my) particular unit within the PCL6 profile I find that it linearizes pretty well within the normal spectrum.

However, the factory profile is tailored to warmer grays and a wider gamut in the skin tone regions than "true" linear. It is very forgiving within the zone of skin tones for non-linear responses and slightly out-of-gamut colors around the skin tonality.

If you are shooting for a pleasant, Perceptual rendering that does not have to color match anything try sticking with the stock profile! I don't think you'll be sorry.

As a match proofer a (quite) bit more care is required in order to pay attention to the shifted gamut response and is much more unforgiving of tonality and subtle contrast shifts.

[Edit 2] Please note: for glossy coated laser papers of normal weight, 20 to 40 pound bond (65-120 g/m2), it is best to use the MPF feeder and select "Coated 1 (106-163 g/m2)". Glossy papers have a special clay coating which absorbs moisture at a rate much different than that of non-coated papers and added moisture content held in the coating will require more heat during final fusing to overcome. Selecting "Coated 1" will guarantee you a perfect glossy result every time.